TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



^ 



V)<^° 




Edward Everktt Hale. 
From a recent photograph by C. M. Bell, Washington. 



TARRY AT HOME 
TRAVELS 



BY 



•EDWARD EVERETT HALE 

AUTHOR OF "the MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY," "MEMORIES 
OF A HUNDRED YEARS," ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED 



" My mind impels me to write on places ivhere 
I have been and on some of the people tvhom. I 
have seen in them." 



Weto Hork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1906 

All rights reserved 



f^ 
.H/^^ 



OCT 2 1906 
lot ASS a- xxo. Mfx 

COPY 8' 



Copyright, 1905, 1906, 
By the outlook COMPANY. 

Copyright, 1906, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1906. 



Nortoool) |3rf3S 

J. 8. Cushii)),' >.t to. — liiTwick v^- Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

The papers which make up this book were 
printed in The Outlook with the same title. The 
first gives the plan and purpose wdiich was sub- 
stantially held to through the series. 

As we now collect them, we are able fre- 
quently to add in detail suggestions which have 
been made by courteous correspondents, — for 
whose kindness I thank them heartily. 

It seemed desirable at the end of the series 

of travel proper to include two papers on the 

City of Washington, which had also been printed 

in The Outlook. 

EDWAED E. HALE. 

Matun0ck, Rhode Island, 
July, 1906. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 




PAGE 


I. 


Introductory 


1 


II. 


The State of IMaine 


. 25 


III. 


New Hampshire 


. 64 


IV. 


Vermont 


. 96 


V. 


Massachusetts 


139 


VI. 


Rhode Island ...... 


198 


VII. 


Connecticut . 


228 


VIII. 


New York 


277 


IX. 


Washington then and now 


349 


X. 


The New Washington .... 


398 


Index 


. 


427 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Edward Everett IJale Frontispiece 

From a recent photograph hy C. M. Bell, Washington. 

PAGE 

Eastport and Passamaquoddy Bay .... 5 
From a print published in London in 1839. 

Lord Ashburton (Alexander Baring) ... 9 

From a mezzotint by Wagstaff, after the painting by Sir 
Thomas Lawrence. 

Daniel Webster 12 

From an engraving by H. Wright Smith, after the paint- 
ing by J. Ames. 

John A. Andrew, 181S-18G7 . . . . . .14 

He was a prominent antislavery advocate, and a member 
of the Massachusetts legislature, but he is best known as 
the Republican governor of Massachusetts throughout the 
Civil War. He was one of the most active of the " war 
governors." 

Outline Map of Maine 17 

Mount Katahdin 20 

Nathan Hale 22 

A reproduction of an old engraving of the author's father. 

Rev. Samuel Longfellow 27 

From a photograph. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 29 

From a characteristic engraving of Longfellow in early life, 
at the time when he was most closely associated with the 
state of Maine. 

Judge Stephen Longfellow ..... 31 

Father of Henry Wadsworth and Samuel Longfellow. 
From a painting. 



X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

BovvDOiN College in its Early Days ... 35 

From an old print. 

TiiK Falls of Sault ox the Chaudieke . . .39 
Characteristic scene on the route of tlie niarcli of Arnold's 
detachment in 1775. From "Arnold's Expedition to Que- 
bec," by .John Codman, 'id, who followed, on foot or in 
canoes, for the greater part of the distance, the army's 
course through the Keunebec, Dead River, and Chaudiere 
regions, and visited Quebec and its environs. 

James Bowdoix, 1752-1811 43 

From a photograph of the painting by Gilbert Stuart, iu 
the Walker Art Building, Bowdoin College. 

William DeWitt Hyde, D.D 46 

President of Bowdoin College since 1885. 

Pkofessoh Alpiieus Si'RixG Packahd, 1839- . . 49 
From a photograph of the painting by F. P. Vinton, in the 
Walker Art Building, Bowdoin College. 

General IIenhy Knox, 1750-1800 .... 51 

From the painting by Charles Willson Peale, 17i)0, in the 
old State House, Philadelphia. 

The Longfellow House ix Poi:tlaxd ... 55 

IIox. Elihu B. Wasiiburxe, 1816-1887 ... 57 

United States Minister to France, 1869-1877. He was the 
only foreign representative who remained in Paris through 
both the siege and the coinmune. He had previously been 
member of Congress from Illinois, 1853-1809. 

James G. Blaixe 61 

From a photograph by Saroiiy. 

Arnold's March through the Wilderxess . . 63 
A curio\is old copperplate engraving, illustrating the diffi- 
culties which Arnold's expedition encountered. From one 
of the very early American histories. 

Mount Washington, and the White Hills . . 65 
From near Crawford's. Rei)roduced from an engraving 
made in 183(), about the time of Dr. Hale's first ascent. 

The Dixville Notch 68 



LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS xi 

PAOE 

On the Presidential Range 70 

Characteristic view of the mountain summits of this range. 

Eleazak Wheelock, 1711-1779 72 

From a painting in tlie possession of Dartmouth College, 
of which he was the first president, 1770-1779. 

Lord Dartmouth 75 

From a painting in the possession of Dartmouth College. 

John Paul Jones 79 

From the original miniature in the United States Naval 
Institute, Annapolis, Maryland. This exceedingly interest- 
ing miniature, hy the Countess de Vendahl, confirms or is 
confirmed by the celebrated bust by Houdon, modelled in the 
same year, 1780. It was given by the noble painter to Jones, 
and from him inlierited by his niece. Miss Janette Taylor of 
Dumfries, Scotland, who, in 18.31, presented it to Lieutenant 
A. B. Pinkham, U.S.N., in acknowledgment of his generosity 
in rebuilding the cottage in which her uncle had been born. 
Lieutenant Pinkliam deposited it in the United States Naval 
Lyceum at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and on the breaking up 
of the Lyceum it was transferred to Annapolis. 

The Broad Arrow 81 

"The broad-headed arrow was a mark assumed at the 
time of the Edwards (when it was considered the most pow- 
erful weapon of attack), as distinguishing the property of 
the king; and this mark has been continued down to the 
present day. Every article supplied to his Majesty's service 
from the arsenals and dockyards is thickly studded with this 
mark, and to be found in possession of any property so 
marked is a capital offence, as it designates that property 
to be the King's ovxn." — From "The King's Own," by 
Captain Marryat. 

Dartmouth College 83 

From an engraving printed in London in 1832. 

Dr. William Jewett Tucker 8.5 

President of Dartmouth College since 1893. 

Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire . . 87 
From a recent photograph. 

Field-Marshal Conway 89 

Henry Seymour Conway, 1721-1795, was an English soldier 
and Whig politician, the second son of the first Lord Conway, 



LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS 



and cousin of Horace Walpole. He served with distinction 
in the British Army, and was a Member of Parliament, 1741- 
17H4. It was lie who moved the repeal of the Stani]) Act in 
177(i, and he was a vijjorous opponent of the policy of the 
British f;overnm(!nt towai'd the American colo7iies. This 
portrait is maile from a copijerplate engraving published in 
London in 17iW. 

John Stark, 1728-1822 

From the excellent portiait painted some time after the 
Revolution by John Trnnibull. This famous painter (175(>- 
184.'?) served in the Revolution, attaining the rank of colonel 
and deputy ailjutant-general ; studied in London under 
AVest and on the Continent, and settled as a portrait i)ainter 
in New York in 1.S04. In addition to his portraits he painted 
many famous historic scenes, including' the four pictures in 
the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington (" The Declaration 
of Independence," "The Surrender of Burgoyne," "The 
Surrender of Cornwallis," " The Resignation of Washing- 
ton "). He was the son of Jonathan Trumbull, of Connecti- 
cut, (j.tK 

The Grken IMountains ....... 

From a recent photograpli. A characteristic scene in one 
of the most picturesque, attractive, and enjoyable ijortions 
of New England. 

Gknkhal Wolkk, 1727-1759 

From his sixteenth year. James Wolfe was actively engaged 
in warfare, beginning with Dettingeu in 1743. He com- 
manded a division under Andierst at the siege and capture 
of Louisl)urg in 1758. He died in his hour of victory at 
Quebec. 

The AssAri/r on Qitehec 

This "View of the Taking of Qnebeck by the English 
Forces commanded by (-ieneral Wolfe, Sept(Mnber 13th, 1759" 
is reproduced from a rare and valuable (copperplate engrav- 
ing i)ublished in the Loudon Mitnuzlnc in 17(50. It is emi- 
nently characteristic of very old prints; for instance, .some 
of the scddiers in the attacking force are lu'arly as tall as 
the cliffs they are so valiantly scaling. 

Ethan Allen 

This engraving, by Hollyer, is from a spirited statue of the 
hero of Ticonderoga. The attitude represents the moment 
when he summoned the surprised garrison to surrender, "In 



PA«iE 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii 



the name of the Great Jehovah and the Coutinental Con- 
gress ! " Vide the reference to Allen in the chapter on Con- 
necticut. No portrait exists of the hero of Ticouderoga. 

View of Burlington, Vermont 106 

From a copperplate engraving of a drawing made about 
seventy years ago. 

Samuel de Champlain 112 

Defeat of thk Iroquois at Lake Champlain . .115 

Of the numerous pictures portraying this historic incident, 
the present one has the special interest of being a facsimile 
of Champlain's engraving, in the l(jl3 edition of his "Voy- 
ages." Champlain himself occupies the centre of the picture. 

Brigadier-General Simon Fraser .... 118 
This portrait of General Fraser, 172!t-1777, who commanded 
the British forces at the battle of Hubbard ton, is from a print 
by James Waison " in the collection of C. R. Hildeburn." 

Ruins of Fort Ticonderoga 120 

The old print from which this picture is made shows the 
ruins of Fort Ticonderoga as they existed just before the 
middle of the last century. Hardly a trace of these ruins 
exists at the present day save a dim outline of the location 
of the main walls of the fort. 

GENEiiAL Stark at the Battle of Bennington . 123 
From an old engraving by J. R. Chapin of the painting by 
J. Godfrey, published in New York shortly before the Civil 
War. 

Ma.ior-General Macomb 127 

Alexander Macomb, who was born at Detroit in 1782, de- 
feated the British under Frevost at Plattsburgh in 1814; he 
was commander-in-chief of the army, 1828-1841. The illus- 
tration is from an engraving by J. B. Longacre of the paint- 
ing by T. Sully. 

Captain Thomas McDonough 129 

He defeated the British squadron under Dovvnie on Lake 
Champlain, September 11, 1814, and was appointed captain 
in that year. His signature reads " Macdonough," and the 
name was so spelled in contemporary books — vide legend 
under illustration on page lo(i; but the accepted spelling 
nowadays is " McDonough." 



xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



pa«;e 



George Peukixs Marsh, 1801-1882 . . . .132 
He was member of Congress from Vermont, 18-12-1849; 
United States JNIinister to Turkey, 1849-18r);>; United States 
Minister to Italy, 18()1-1882. This picture is from the por- 
trait by G. P. A. Healey, painted in 1845. 

Mrs. Gkorge Perkins Marsh 134 

Commodore ]\Iacdonough's Farmhouse . . . 136 

This very curious old enij^ravinj?, from the Anahctic Mar/a- 
zine, published in Philadelphia in 1818, shows the modest 
farmhouse in which Captain Macdonough (Commodore by 
courtesy) lived on Cumberland Bay, Lake Champlain, while 
in the distance are shown the American forts, the town of 
Plattsburgh, the river Saranac, the British camp, and head- 
quarters of Sir George Prevost. It is a typical example of 
the American engravings of that day. 

The State House, Boston- 138 

" What Dr. Holmes audaciously called the ' Hub of the 
Universe.'" From a drawing by Charles Wellington Fur- 
long. Nowadays this dome is brilliantly illuminated at 
night with electric lights. 

Pine-tree Shilling 139 

These picturesque coins, the first made in the colonies, rep- 
resentetl an assertion of a measure of independence; they 
figure in many interesting incidents. 

Henry AVriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton 140 
This picture shows the famous Earl of Southampton as a 
young man of twenty-one; it is from the original picture at 
Welbeck Abbey. " A young man resplendently attired. His 
doublet is of white satin ; a broad collar, edged with lace, 
half covers a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with 
silver thread ; the white trunks and knee-breeches are laced 
with gold; the sword-belt, embroidered in red and gold, is 
decorated at intervals with white silk bows; the hilt of the 
rapier is overlaid with gold ; purple garters, embroidered iu 
silver thread, fasten the white stockings below the knee. 
Light body armour, richly damas(!ened, lies on the ground 
to the right of the figure ; and a white-i)lumed lielmet stands 
to the left on a table covered with a cloth of purple velvet 
embroidered in gohL Such gorgeous raiment suggests that 
its wearer bestowed much attention on his personal equip- 
ment. But the head is more interesting than the body. The 
eyes are blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear, and 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



the expression sedate ; rings are in tlie ears ; beard and 
■moustaclie are at an incipient stage, and are of the same 
briglit auburn hue as the hair in a picture of Southampton's 
mother that is also at Welbeck. But, liowever scanty is the 
down on the youtli's cheek, the hair on liis liead is luxuriant. 
It is worn very long, and falls over and below the shoulder. 
The colour is now of walnut, but was originally of lighter 
tint." — From Sidney Lee's "A Life of William Shake- 
speare." 

John Winthrop 143 

Autograph, seal, and portrait attributed to Van Dyek, in 
Massachusetts State House. 

QuiNCY Railway Pitcher 146 

This bit of Staffordshire ware shows the first railway in 
America, sometimes called the "Experiment" railroad, built 
to carry stones to Bunker Hill Monument. All the first rail- 
cars were drawn by horses. 

The Stourbridge Lion 147 

This was the first locomotive in America (1829). 

The Veazie Railroad, Bangor, Maine (1836) . . 148 
This railroad "had two locomotives of Stevenson's make 
from England. They had no cabs when they arrived here, 
but rude ones were attached. They burned wood. The cars 
were also English ; a box resembling a stage-coach was 
placed on a rude platform. Each coach carried eight people. 
The passengers entered the side. The train ran about twelve 
miles in forty minutes. The rails, like those of other rail- 
roads at the time, were of strap-iron spiked down. These 
spikes soon rattled loose, so each engine carried a man 
with a sledge-hammer, who watched the track, and when 
he spied a spike sticking up he would reach down and drive 
it home. These 'snake heads,' as the rolled-up ends of the 
strap-iron were called, sometimes were forced up through 
the cars and did great damage. ' Snake heads ' were as com- 
mon in railway travel as snags in the river in early steam- 
boating." — From " Stage-coach and Tavern Days," by Alice 
Morse Earle. 

Jonathan Edwards 1,50 

From a recent photograph of the original painting of 1740, 
when Edwards was thirty-seven. 

John Adams 151 



xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



I'ACJE 

The Battle of Lexington 15;} 

From iiu old engraving. Probably the most truthful pic- 
ture of this historic incident. 

John Emot preaching to the Indians . . . 156 
From the mural painting by Henry O. Walker, in the 
State House, Boston. 

Ralph Waldo Emehson 158 

From a portrait of about the time of Emerson's earlier 
essays. 

Destkitction of Tea in Boston Hahijou . . . 160 

From an engraving in one of the earliest American histories. 
The men who disguised themselves as Indians and threw the 
tea overboard were, it is said, fairly well-known to every oue 
except the British authorities. 

Paul Kevehe 161 

From the portrait by Gilbert Stuart, painted in 1807, when 
Revere was seventy-two. 

Chkist Church, Salem Street, Boston . . . 165 
From a drawing by Louis A. Holman, 1903. 

He said to his friend, " If the British march 
By land or sea from the town to-night, 
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry ar(!h 
Of the North (Hiurch tower as a signal light, — 
One, if Ijy land, and two, if by sea; 
And I on the oi)posite shore will be. 
Ready to ride and spread the alarm 
Through every Middlesex village and farm, 
For the countryfolk to be up and to arm." 
— From Longfellow's poem, " Paul Revere's Ride." 

The Evacuation of Boston 167 

From an engraving by F. T. Stuart of the drawing by 
L. HoUis. March 17th is still celebrated in Boston as Evacua- 
tion Day. 

The Constitution 169 

From the painting by Marshall Johnson. The most spirited 
of all the pictorial representations of this famous ship. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

The Gerrymander 172 

After Governor Gerry and the Democrats had succeeded in 
electing a Democratic legislature in Massacliusetts, 1811, tliey 
so divided and rearranged certain counties as to provide 
Democratic majorities in Federal counties. The editor of 
the Boston Centinel, who had fought against the scheme, 
took a map of one county, and designated by particular 
coloring the towns thus selected and hung it on the wall of 
his editorial room. "One day Gilbert Stuart, the eminent 
painter, looked at the map, and said the towns which Russell 
had thus distinguished resembled some monstrous animal. 
He took a pencil and with a few touches represented a head, 
wings, claws, and tail. 'There,' said Stuart, 'that will do 
for a salamander.' Russell, who was busy with his pen, 
looked up at the hideous figure, and exclaimed, ' Salamander! 
Call it Gerry-mander.' The word was immediately adopted 
into the political vocabulary as a term of reproach for those 
who changed boundaries of districts for a partisan purpose." 
— From " Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History." 

Harvard College in 1836 173 

This illustration, from one of the best of all the engravings 
of Harvard College, shows the ijrocession in honor of the 
Second Centennial Celebration, and also several of the more 
famous buildings. Old Massachusetts Hall is just to the 
right of the centre of the picture, and Harvard Hall is to the 
left, with Holden Chapel farther to the left, and Hollis and 
Stoughton just behind it. Dr. Hale graduated at Harvard 
in 1839. 

Henry W. Longeellow 177 

This portrait of Longfellow shows the professor who first 
occupied the chair of Belles Lettres at Harvard, and who 
" was not only to teach us but to quicken us and inspire us 
and make us glad that we were admitted into the secrets of 
learning and literature. ... He changed the routine of his 
part of the college from the routine of the class-room to the 
courtesies and cordialities of a parlor." 

Departure oe the Pilgrim Fathers from Delft 
Haven 179 

From the painting by Charles W. Cope. The Pilgrim 
Fathers, who landed at Plymouth from the Muyfloioer, sailed 
from Southampton, where they had been joined by those 
who had left Delft Haven, Holland, in the Speedwell some 
weeks before. 



xviii LIST OV ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Edward Winslow 181 

TIic only nieinl)er of the oi'igiual band of Pilgrim Fathers 
upon whose likeness we can look to<lay. He negotiated a 
treaty with Massasoit in 1021 ; was three times Governor of 
Plynioutli Colony; made several trips to England in its 
behalf, and wrote several tracts about it. 

Public Wokship at Plymouth by the Pilgrims . 182 

The Wayside Inn, Sudbuky, Massachusetts . . 181 

A present-day picture of this very old aTul famous inn, still 
used as a hostelry ; the scene of the supposed telling of 
Longfellow's " Tales of a Wayside luu." 

Senator Hoar 182 

The "Columbia "and the "Lady Washington" ox 

the Pacific Coast 187 

This scene, from one of Captain Robert Gray's voyages 
that made known the nature of our northern Pacific coast, 
is from the original drawing in possession of Mrs. A. S. 
Twombly, a granddaughter of Captain Gray. 

Henry Laurens Dawes 190 

Henry I). Thoueau 191 

Charles Sumner 194 

From a photograph hi possession of F. J. Garrison, Esq. 

PitOFEssoR Asa (jRay 196 

The eminent botanist. He was Professor of Natural His- 
tory at Harvard from 1S42 to 1888. 

Ochre Point, Newport 199 

Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeure, Comte de 

Kochambeait, 1725-1807 201 

Chevalier di; Ciiastellux 202 

"Destruction of the Schooner 'Gaspe' in the 

Waters of Rhode Island, 1772" .... 2(1.} 

This engraving, by Rogers, of the painting by J. McNevin, 
illustrates one of the picturesque incidents, i)receding the 
Revolution, in which the colonists began to assert their inde- 
pendence. Narratives survive that tell how a man went round 
the town at dusk beating a drum and inviting all who wished 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



to join the expedition to meet at a certain house that evening ; 
how the men were divided among the hoats, each boat with 
its leader ; how they rowed with muffled oars to the schooner ; 
how they boarded her and made her crew prisoners; and 
how they burned her to the water's edge. 

Samuel Sewall 205 

Landing of Roger Williams 207 

From an old steel engravijig. 
Roger Williams 209 

Statue by Franklin Simmons, at Providence, Rhode Island. 
No authentic portrait of Roger Williams exists. 

Captain Esek Hopkins 211 

"Commandant en Chef la Flotte Ame'ricaine." From a 
curious contemporary portrait of French origin. Porti-aits 
of several prominent fighters on the American side in the 
Revolution were reproduced in France. 

George Fox 216 

General Nathanael Greene 218 

Gilbert Stuart 220 

From the portrait by Neagle, in the Boston Museum. 

Francis Wayland 225 

At the age of sixty. 

Fort Connanicut, R.I 227 

From an old engraving. 

Seal of Connecticut 228 

Captain Wadswortii concealing the Charter of 

Connecticut, 1687 229 

From one of the early volumes of American history. 

The Charter Oak 231 

From an engraving of the painting by C. D. W. Brownell, 
in 1855. The tree was destroyed in the following year. 

Oliver Ellsworth 232 

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. 
From the original miniature by Trumbull, in the possession 
of Yale College. 

Jonathan Trumbull 235 

Governor of Connecticut, 1709-1783. Said to have been the 
original "Brother Jonathan," that having been Washing- 
ton's familiar name for him. 



XX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIOXS 

PAGE 

Capturk of Four Ticonderooa '2-M 

Ethan Allen summoiiiiif; tlu' coimiiaiKltu' of the j^arrisoii tu 
surrender. 

View of IIartfoud . . . . . . . . 2-]d 

From an old engraving. 

Nkw Haven, fuom Ferry IIili 241 

From an old engraving. 

Yale College and State IIofse .... 243 

From a steel engraving made early in the last century. 

Lyman Beecher 246 

John Piekpont ......... 248 

From an engraving by H. S. Sadd, of the daguerreotype l)y 
Whipple. 

Bash Bish Falls 249 

This recent photograph shows the lower falls of Bash Bish, 
but not the cataract above it nor the upper falls. The falls 
are about 100 yards east of the Massachusetts-New York 
state line. 

Destruction of the Pequots 250 

" The savage for the first time knew who his master was 
when the trainbands stormed the palisa<les at Mystic." 

Dr. Timothy Dwight 251 

A "Lath" in Process of loading with Tobacco . 255 
A scene typical of the rich tobacco fields in the Connecticut 
Valley. The tobacco is thus transferred to the barns, where 
it is stored in the same position, i.e. upside down, to dry. 

Settlers of Connecticut 259 

A reproduction of one of those^ queer and perhaps crude 
illustrations in the early volumes dealing with American 
history. 

The Capitol at Hartford 260 

The Death of Captain Ferrer 261 

This picture, showing the slaves on the Amistad in the act 
of overcoming the crew, is from a contemporary engraving. 

Roger Sherman Baldwin, 1703-186:5 .... 263 
Governor of Connecticut, United States senator, and mem- 
ber of the " Peace Congress." 



LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS xxi 

PAGE 

Charles Goodyear 266 

John Quincy Adams 267 

From the painting by Edward D. Marchant, 1847, in the 
New York Historical Society. 

Roger Sherman 269 

General Israel Putnam 270 

" Major-jjeneral of the Connecticut forces and Commander- 
in-chief at the Enjjagement on Buncker's Hill, near Boston, 
17 June, 1775." From an engraving, published in London 
in 1775, of the painting by Wilkinson. 

General Putnam's Feat at Horse Neck . . . 271 
Of the many old engravings picturing the incident, this is 
probably the truest to life, as well as to the locality in which 
it took place. 

Putnam's Wolf Den 272 

As it looks at the present day. 

John Howard Male's Glastonbury Orchards. . 273 

The largest peach orchards north of West Virginia or east 
of the Mississippi. Annual yield, 40,000 to 50,000 bushels. 

Map of Historical Places in New York State . 278 

Landing of Hendrik Hudson 279 

" View of the Great Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk 

River" 282 

Lake George 284 

The Narrows, with Black Mountain and Bolton, and the 
Hummock in the foreground. 

Albany 287 

From an engraving of about the year 1840. 
The Capitol at Albany 290 

Scene from the Battle of Saratoga . . . 291 
General Arnold wounded in the attack on the Hessian 
redoubt. 

Madam Riedesel 293 

From a portrait in her " Memoirs." 



xxu 



LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS 



PAGE 

General Buugoyne 294 

From a copperplate engraving by J. Cliapnuin, published 
in 1801. 

CoNSCHii'TioN OF Gekman Soldikus fou Skrvice in 

Amkuica 295 

Buhgoynk's Ahmy ox tuk Road fkom Lake Cham- 
plain TO Four Edward 297 

Illustrating how the retreating American force destroyed 
bridges and felled trees in the way of the advancing British 
army. 

General (Grant's Cottage at ]\Iount McGregor . 298 

" Ball.stox Springs " 299 

From a scarce print, showing the town in its fashionable 
days (about 18:35). 

View of Saratoga 300 

From a large lithograph printed in 1848. 

DeWitt Clinton 302 

From the bust by Uurand. 

Route of the Erie Canai 304 

The Mohawk Valley 305 

From "Picturesque America." 

View of the Erie Canal at the Little Falls . 307 
From an engraving published in Loudon in 1831. 

The Erie Canal at Lockport 308 

From an early engraving. 

TlSAVELLING BY PaCKET BoAT, ErIE CaNAL . , 309 

Dr. Eliphalet Nott 312 

President of Union College, Schenectady, 1804-180(5. 

Red Jacket, SA(iOYEWATnA, 1752-1830 . . . 313 

From the painting by Robert W. Weir. When the Seneca 
chief sat to Weir for this painting, he went to the studio 
accompanied by his interpreter and a inimber of braves, all 
of whom showed unconinion interest in the progress of the 
work. The medal Red Jacket wears was given to him by 
Washington, and he was never without it, even when clothed 
oiilv in nature's irarb. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xxiii 

PAGE 

The Murder of Miss McCrea 316 

She was killed near Fort Edward, New York, in July, 
1777, and (it is said) by Indian allies of Burgoyne. 

Schenectady, from the West 317 

This engraving is of particular interest on account of the 
very curious old bridge which it shows. 

Glens Falls 320 

Salt Manufacture at Syracuse .... 322 

Views illustrating various processes of a very old industry. 

" Storming of Stoney Point " 324 

Niagara Falls 329 

Fanny Kemble 331 

Chautauqua Lake and Point 334 

Falls of Genesee River, at Rochester . . . 336 

The old engraving from which this picture is taken shows 
the river before its banks were lined with factories, to take 
advantage of the water power. 

Jacob Gould Schurman 338 

President of Cornell since 1892. From a recent photograph. 

The Mall, Central Park .339 

Inauguration of Washington 341 

Reproduced from a painting showing the following persons, 
from left to right: Livingston, St. Clair, Otis, Knox, Sher- 
man, Washington, Steuben, and Adams. The inauguration 
took place on the balcony of a building then located at the 
corner of Wall and Nassau Streets, where the Sub-Treasury 
now stands. 

CoNESTOGA Wagon 344 

The vehicle in which was made the early emigration to 
the western parts of New York State and to what is now the 
Middle West. The forerunner of the prairie schooner. 

Ezra Stiles 346 

Emigration to the Western Country . . . 347 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

President Washington :5oO 

The present portrait, one of several painted by Stnart, is 
perhaps the best of all the pictures of Washington. It repre- 
sents him about the year 1794. 

Plan of the City of Washington .... 351 
This plan, which has sinee, of course, been greatly ex- 
tended, is, it would seem, L'Eiifant's plan as modified by 
Ellicott. The engraving from which this picture is taken 
was published in London in 17'J8. 

Ma.jor Andrew Ellicott, 175i-182() .... 355 
He served as an ofticer in the Revolution, and throughout 
most of his life tilled important positions under the Federal 
and State Governments. From ITSXi to 1801 he served as 
Commissioner in settling the southern boundary of the 
United States. Later, he taught mathematics and engineer- 
ing at West Point. 

View of the Potomac and the Site of Washing- 
ton IN 1800 357 

From an old engraving. 

View of Potomac and the City of Washington . 359 
This engraving, which gives the view from Geisborough, 
apparently dates from the first decade of the last century. 

Charles Bulfinch 361 

Monument at the Navy Yard, AVashington . . 363 
Erected in 18()0, in commemoration of the sailors of the 
Revolution and the war with the Harl)ary Pirates. 

Back View of the Capitol, Washington . . . 365 
From an engraving of about 1810. 

Mount Vernon ^^'^ 

The tomb of Washington. From an old steel engraving. 

The Capitol at Washington '^68 

View from the northeast. From a lithograph published in 
Wa.shington about 18;«). 

The President's House, WAsinN<;TON. . . • 370 

From an engraving of about the year 1832. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIO:?^S xxv 

PAfJK 

The Department of State 371 

From an engraving, of French origin, dating from early in 
the last century. 

Interior of the House of Representatives . . 372 
From an engraving published in London in 1831. 

View of Washington from the Capitol . . . 374 
This old engi-aving shows a view of Washington in 1832, 
looking from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue. The 
city probably looked very much like this about the time of 
Dr. Hale's first visit. 

The President's House, from the Potomac . . 376 

The engraving from which this picture is made was pub- 
lished in London in 1839. 

Washington, from the White House . . . 379 

This view, of about the year 1840, looks from the rear 
balcony of the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue 
toward the Capitol. 

Mrs. Madison 381 

From an engraving of one of the best paintings of Mrs. 
Madison, which shows her as she looked in the late thirties. 

The Smithsonian Institute 382 

From an old engraving. 

The Capitol at Washington 384 

About the middle of the last century. 

The House of Representatives 386 

About the middle of the last century. 

The Navy Yard, Washington 388 

The Grand Review at Washingto.v .... 389 

General Sherman's army passing the head stand, in front 
*f the White House, May 24, 18(3"). From a contemporary 
lithograph. 

Bird's-eye View of Washington .... 393 

Shortly after the close of the Civil War. 

Washington, from Arlington Heights . . . 396 
This engraving, of the year 1872, shows the finished Capitol 
and the untinished Washington Monument. 



xxvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Joseph G. Cannon 399 

Speaker of the House of Representatives: and, incidentally, 
the most powerful man in Washington except, possibly, the 
President. 

(THE FOLLOWING VIEW^S ARE FROM PRESENT-DAY 
WASHIN(iTON) 

Connecticut Avenue 401 

Present-day view of the Avenue off which the cows were 
pastured when Dr. Hale first went to Washington, as related 
in the previous chapter. 

Upper Connecticut Avenue, and Cornek of Oak 

Lawn 403 

The Department of Agriculture .... 406 

The State, War, and Navy Departments . . 409 

The Patent Office . . . . . . .411 

The White House 414 

The Post-office Department 416 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTORY 

It seems to me curious that so few people 
write about travels in the United States. One 
in a thousand of the intelligent Americans who 
travel in Europe puts his observations in print. 
One in fifty of the people who cross Asia does the 
same; and every one who crosses Africa does. 
But of the travellers of America you might count 
on the fingers of two hands all who have 
written anything worth reading that has been 
printed in the last twenty years. 

Of which one consequence is that when you 
talk with intelligent Americans you find that 
they know more of Switzerland and perhaps of 
Moscow or of Stonehenge than they know of 
Indianapolis, or of Trenton Falls, or of Bona- 
venture, or Chimborazo. You can go to an 



2 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

illustrated lecture and come home and feel after- 
wards that you have been on a Norwegian canal 
or a Portuguese railway. But if there are such 
shows of my own country, I am not favored. 
I am always on the lookout for them, but I 
never find them. 

A little boy who was a friend of mine was 
studying arithmetic at school, and he came to 
the process known by the schoolmasters as "long 
division." It said in the book, ''Inquire how 
many times the Divisor goes into the Dividend." 
So when he had his slate adjusted to Divisor and 
Dividend, he went to ask his teacher how far 
one went into the other. She remonstrated, but 
he said that that was what the book said — it 
told him to "inquire," and he ''inquired." 

The average American is left in very much 
the condition of that boy. If he wants to know 
about Vermont, he cannot find any book that 
tells him. Whoever he speaks to about it is 
annoyed or pretends to gape, and tells him to 
go to Vermont and see. The newspapers are 
painfully provincial. It is hard to make them 



INTRODUCTORY 3 

print some spirited letter from a bright friend 
who is travelhng in the steps of Lewis and Clark, 
or among the wonders of California. Once there 
were such books as Lewis and Clark's or Fre- 
mont's, or Francis Parkman's or Dwight's ''Trav- 
els in New England," or Flint's^ ''Mississippi." 
But, as I say, we do not find such books now. 
One recollects, of course, "The Wedding Jour- 
ney" of Howells, and "A Chance Acquaintance," 
and other such fragments. But not enough of 
them. I sent to a magazine a good story once, 
where the bride and her husband travelled on the 
Vanderbilt lines. I had to strike out this allu- 
sion lest it should be an advertisement ! 

I should like to have exactly such a book 
about the United States as an English doctor, 
whose name I have forgotten, made about the 
continent of Europe just after Napoleon was 
sent to Elba. English people had been shut off 
from the continent for half a generation. In 
fact, unless they were named Arthur Young, 
Addison, or Prior, or Sterne, or John Milton, 
they had not gone there much before. One of 



4 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the charms of Jane Austen's novels is that they 
are exquisitely insular. A post-captain or an 
admiral may be alluded to because Britannia 
rules the waves. But the continent of Europe 
or the double continent of America is referred 
to no more than the Planet Neptune, of which 
she had never heard. This unknown English 
doctor sent his English carriage across to Calais, 
made up a party of four, took his life in his hands, 
and rode to Italy and back again, and told from 
day to day just what he had seen. It is grace- 
less of me to forget his name, for he wrote a very 
entertaining book. Dear old Dr. Dwight, the 
President of Yale College, started from New 
Haven, a hundred years ago, and jumbled about 
the New England states and wrote an account 
of them in just the same way. Our friend Mr. 
Lummis started with his dog, l^oth on foot, from 
Chillicothe in Ohio and walked to Los Angeles 
in California. The dog died, but Mr. Lummis 
wrote a very entertaining book about the jour- 
ney. But Dr. Dwight is in heaven; I suppose 
the English doctor is, for if he were alive, he 



INTRODUCTORY 7 

must be one hundred and thirteen years old ; and 
Mr. Lummis is too busy with his magazine to start 
again. So I am writing these Unes, not so much 
for what they tell as to call the attention of 
readers to what they do not tell. Think of the 
great voids of ignorance ! Think how little you 
know about North Dakota or Idaho ! 

Of course modern science answers that we 
should travel ourselves. We should see with 
our own eyes and hear with our ears and under- 
stand with our hearts the wonderful things 
which are in our own country, and then should 
turn round and tell them to others. As Tasso says, 

When I am left to tell in other's ear 

The wonders seen, and whisper, " I was there." 

But in face of this scientific course there are 
difficulties. One, it costs so much to travel in 
America. I can go about anywhere in Spain or 
Switzerland, and at the end of the week I only 
have to draw for twenty-five dollars from my 
banker. But in America, wherever I go, the 
railways make me pay so much, and the hotels 



8 TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 

make me pay so much, and the steamboats, 
that just as I am ready for my grand tour i:i 
America, some one says to me, ''Take a second- 
class ticket with me for Hamburg;" and I do, 
and we travel in Bohemia instead of going to 
Tacoma. It is only by pretending to be a school- 
master and taking a half-price ticket to attend 
an ''Educational Convention" — as if there were 
any such word as "educational," and as if there 
were much use in a convention — it is only thus 
that I can go to see Bunker Hill, if I happen to 
live ill the North Park. All of w^iich w^e will 
hope the future will reform for us. 

Having said this, I will try to start the intelli- 
gent reader on his own feet; and we will give 
him some hint of what he ought to see, and I will 
not pretend to show it to him. He shall have 
some other hint of what he ought to hear, but 
I will not pretend to speak it. Some of the best 
essays about this world which have been written 
are the prefaces to Murray's and Baedeker's 
Guide Books. They do not tell the traveller 
what he is to see. That comes afterwards in the 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

book. But they try to quicken his enthusiasm, 
to make him see that travel is worth while, and 
to understand that it is neither so dangerous 




Lord Ashburton. 

From a mezzotint by Wag'staff, after the painting 

by Sir Thomas Lawrence. 

nor so difficult as he supposes. I will try here, 
mostly by memories, sometimes by expectations, 
with an occasional word of the present fact, to 



10 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

interest the average reader in some plan for see- 
ing some part of his own home, which he has never 
seen until now. 

There are two notable studies of New England 
which you had better read right through before 
you make your plans for next June. They are 
in the first volume and the second of Dr. Palfrey's 
"History of New England." They not only tell 
what he Imew, which was a great deal, but they 
give you almost all the references which you need 
if you have the genuine historical passion. The 
average American has no such passion. He does 
not care anything about history. This is indeed 
the proverb of the hustling editor of to-day — 
that even newspapers have nothing to do with 
history. One of them, with pathetic blindness, 
quoted from Jules Verne the remark that you 
got no history out of the newspaper, really 
thinking that Jules Verne intended this for a 
compliment. But there are occasional people 
who are curious to know where the plant of 
Indian corn came from, and what sort of a seed 
it had ; where the pine tree came from, and what 



INTRODUCTORY 11 

sort of a seed it had. And that sort of people 
Hke to know what the Thirteen States were, and 
how they are different from the thirty-two 
others ; what a New England forest was, and how 
it differs from the New England of factories and 
high schools; who Massasoit or Canonicus were, 
and how they differed from Charles William Ehot 
and John Davis Long. These people are the 
people who care for history, and they will be glad 
of such references as Dr. Palfrey gives them; 
and they will be glad to read the chapters of which 
I have spoken; and in very rare cases they will 
go to the American Antiquarian Library or the 
John Carter Brown collection of books in Provi- 
dence, or the Massachusetts Historical Society's 
Library, or to that of Harvard College, or to the 
Howard Library in New Orleans to see for them- 
selves the original authorities. 

For our present purpose it must be enough to 
say that New England is a peninsula included 
within an oblong which, if roughly drawn, meas- 
ures eight degrees of latitude and nine of longi- 
tude — a little more accurately, perhaps, sixty 



12 



TAKRY AT HOME TKAVELS 



or eighty thousand square miles, be the same more 
or less. Dear Dr. Palfrey says with a certain 
pride that it is just halfway from the Equator 




Danikl Wkisstkr. 
From an engraving by H. Wright Smith, after the painting by J. Ames. 



to the Pole, and this is interesting, for it gives 
some slight scientific authority to Dr. Holmes's 
claim that the gilded dome of the Boston State 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

House is the ''Hub of the Universe." Indeed, 
it would amuse the first class in the ninth grade 
of some grammar school to see how nearly that 
same gilded dome is at the centre of inhabited 
New England. Possibly some advanced student 
in that class may find out, what is unlviiown to 
all the readers of these lines, why the accomplished 
architect Charles Bulfinch put a pineapple on top 
of the dome. 

Some of the old writers really thought that New 
England was an island. What they Imew was 
that Henry Hudson had worked his way in the 
Half Moon up from the ocean on the south as 
far as Albany; that Champlain had come by 
water from the ocean on the north as far as Lake 
Champlain ; that between Albany and the head 
of Lake George there is not a wide distance. Li 
point of fact, I believe the neck of land between 
the waters which flow into the St. Lawrence 
and the waters which flow into the Hudson is not 
more than two miles across. If anybody cares, 
it was within twenty miles of this neck that 
Burgoyne received his coup de grace, and that 



14 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the history of modern civiUzation changed when, 
in his capitulation, the independence of the United 
States was made sure. 
I was once at an evening party, talking with 




John A. Andrew. 
War Governor of Massaebiisetts. 



one of the great New Englanders, John Albion 
Andrew, when Louis Agassiz joined us. I said, 
''Agassiz, I wish you would tell Andrew what I 
am telling him ; you would do it so much better 
than I." Naturally, he asked me what I was 



INTEODUCTORY 15 

telling him. Now, it was at the time of one of 
our prehistoric quarrels with England, when the 
understanding between the two countries was not 
as cordial as it is now. England and the United 
States were quarrelling about 54-40, or codfish, 
or something — I have forgotten what. I said, 
''I am telling Andrew how you told us that when 
the Lord God thought he would make a world out 
of a spinning ball of red-hot water and steam 
which there was, he made some rocks rise up 
as a sort of nucleus of the man-habitable world, 
and that the first thing he thought of was to 
make the ridge between the United States and 
Canada." 

Agassiz laughed, and said that he had not put 
it in exactly that way, but that that was the truth. 
And whoever reads the old treaty of 1783 will be 
edified in finding that 'Hhe highlands between 
the waters flowing into the St. Lawrence" and 
the waters flowing into the Atlantic were named 
by those ungeological diplomatists who made the 
treaty, as the northern boundary of New England. 
That critical ridge of rock which poked its head 



16 TAllllY AT HOME TRAVELS 

up on that fine morning described in the ninth 
verse of the first chapter of Genesis may still be 
traced by the amateur fisherman who has gone 
up to the narrow trout brook at the head of the 
Connecticut. It is the same rock which you pass 
on the Vanderbilt road, just north of the Mohawk, 
at Little Falls and along in such places, if you are 
on Howells's ''Wedding Journey" or on Lucy 
Poor's. 

Lord Ashburton and Mr. Webster agreed for 
the northeastern part of the country to make 
an artificial line. But you and I, for the conven- 
ience of things, may recollect that all of us New 
Englanders probably live above the oldest land 
in the world. That is the reason of a certain 
arrogance which other people accuse us of. But, 
really, we have not much to do with that steam- 
ing rock of a hundred million seons ago, for all 
New England was made over again, it seems, 
when the glaciers came down from the north, 
covering us all over with a sheet of ice which 
was a thousand feet thick, or more, even over 
the top of our Mount Washington. It drifted 




^York 
^Piscatagua R. 



Outline Map of Maine. 
17 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

south and south and south, until the Atlantic 
Ocean proved to be too warm for it. It left its 
gravel and sand and smaller boulders first in a 
ridge which became Long Island, Block Island, 
and Nantucket, and, after years more, it made 
another ridge which is now southern Connecti- 
cut and southern Rhode Island and Cape Cod, 
I suppose, including, among other excellent places, 
my own summer home. And, still again, it made 
a third* ridge, five or ten miles inland from the 
Long Island Sound of to-day. Recollect this, 
my sophomore friend, when walking through 
New England with your nightgown and tooth- 
brush in a knapsack. Recollect this. Madam 
Champernoon, as your chauffeur takes you along 
the Connecticut Valley at a rate not exceeding 
fifteen miles an hour, as required by the statute, 
in those last happy moments before the boiler 
explodes and you and he leave the study of ter- 
restrial geology. 

Of this territory J. of which we have established 
the age in such satisfactory and substantial 
fashion, the state of Maine makes nearly one- 



20 



TAUKV AT HOME TRAVELS 



lialf — tliirty-three thousand square miles. The 
people of Maine call it the "State of Maine/' 
with a certain pride and frequency not observable 
in other states. You say Delaware did this or 




MoLM Katahdin. 

Ohio did that, when a Maine man is a little ai)t 
to say, "the State of Maine" did this and the 
''State of ]\hiine" did that^ This is because 
from near the beginning until 1820 it was the 
District, or vernacular ''Deestrict/' of Maine. 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

Under the passage of what is known as the 
Missouri Compromise Act in our poHtics, it was 
set apart as a state. And the older people 
still remember with pride that it is no longer the 
''Deestrict/' but it is the state of Maine — a 
pride which asserts itself even when they are 
unconscious of what they are saying. 

Maine and Vermont are virtually the youngest 
of the New England states. This is because in 
practice in the beginning people did not like to go 
into wildernesses to settle them, although they 
knew very well what happy homes they would 
make. They did not like to, while there was 
any fear of French attack upon the north. The 
French always brought Indians with them. And 
you may charge it to the French religion or not 
as you choose, but the savage warfare which they 
carried on under French direction was of the most 
horrible kind. If anybody cares, it is to be ob- 
served that the hatred of the Roman Catholic 
Church which existed formerly in New England 
was due to the memory that the savage raids 
of the eighteenth century were in all instances 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



mixed up with French invasion, and were ascribed 
by the sufferers to the macliinations of Latin 
priests. But with General Wolfe at Quebec in 
1759 such French domination practically ended — 
no more terror of savage warfare. And then 
New Hampshire people were glad enough to 

leave their 
gravel and rock 
for the fer- 
tile valleys of 
Vermont, and 
the Massachu- 
setts people 
glad enough to 
send their emi- 
grants up into 
the valleys of 
the Kennebec 
and Penobscot. 
Before that time Maine was simply a fringe of 
seaboard towns. 

My father was a born geographer, and l^efore 
he died he found, rather to his own surprise, I 




Nathan Hale. 
From ail old engraving. 



INTRODUCTORY 23 

think, that he was a great engineer. I am apt 
to think that I and my children inherit from him 
certain tastes and habits which our nearest 
friends sometimes venture to call Bohemian. 

What I know is that I was born in the month 
of April, 1822, and that before I was four months 
old he had taken us all to Dover, New Hamp- 
shire, to be noted here as the oldest town in 
that state. There he left my mother and her 
four little children in the country tavern of 
the day while he and the great botanist, Dr. 
Jacob Bigelow, and two or three friends of theirs 
went on horseback through the Notch of the White 
Mountains. Their account of this expedition con- 
tains, I think, the first scientific narratives re- 
garding those mountains. They were published 
at the time in a tract, now rare, which has an 
interest for us Appalachians. 

This expedition was the first bit of travel 
which ever took me outside of Massachusetts. 
I do not affect to remember the New Hampshire 
of that time, but I like to record this adventure. 
A charming cousin of mine, one of the finest 



24 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

women of the century, used to tell me with amuse- 
ment that she had made my acquaintance there 
and then, while I still wore the simpler garments 
of babyhood. Let this be the i)reludc to these 
memories of my own dealings afterwards with 
the different states of New England. 



CHAPTER II 
THE STATE OF MAINE 

First of Maine. "Dirigo, I lead," is the fine 
motto of that state. Its people have no reason 
to be ashamed of it or to blush because their 
fathers chose it. It means, if you are modest, 
that Maine begins the list of the United States, 
because in those days men began at the north 
and repeated the list from north to south. So 
it was Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont. In 
these days the Pacific state of Washington runs 
farther north, to the parallel of 49. But in the 
days of the district of Maine no state ran so 
hear the North Pole as she did. So Maine does 
lead for every schoolboy and every schoolgirl 
of America. 

If, again, anybody cares, one of Samuel Hale's 
grandsons moved out into eastern Maine, while 
one of his sons moved into Connecticut. The son 

25 



26 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

of this Connecticut man was my grandfather. 
And he was cousin, if you please, of the grand- 
father of those men from Maine who now find 
their companions in Senates and stand unawed 
before kings. But I did not know that when I 
first went there. I beheve I only mention it now 
to say that the Hales of Maine are our sort of 
Hales; the Hales of New Hampshire are of the 
sort of the distinguished lady I have spoken of, 
and are also of our kind of Hales, 'Hhe Hales 
who do not have sugar in their coffee." The 
Hales of Vermont are of the Newbury Hales, 
which means Thomas the Glover. They also are 
admirable people, and they have a Nathan Hale 
of their own who was a Captain Nathan Hale of 
the Revolution, and died a prisoner of war near 
New York and shall be spoken of hereafter. 
My son Philip is an artist. He was in a New 
York gallery one day when it was what the artists 
call ''varnishing day," and a lady, referring to 
his picture, said, "So you have come to New 
York to l)e hanged, Mr. Hale." "Yes," said he; 
"that is the way the Hales usually come." 



THE STATE OF MAINE 



27 



Perhaps it is as well to say that the Massa- 
chusetts Hales are some of them of one kind and 
some of another, and yet a third belong to the 




Samuel Longfellow. 



Rehoboth Hales. The Rhode Island Hales are 
mostly Rehoboth Hales. Besides the Coventry 
Hales in Connecticut, of whom I am, and the 
Ashford Hales, who are our cousins, are the 



28 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Glastonbury Hales. They arc the people who now 
produce peaches for the world, and are our cousins 
on another line from the Ashford Hales. 

It is my belief that in all these lines the Hales 
were cousins of each other. Generally speaking, 
they are tall, with a tendency to black hair. 
Without exception they love their country and 
tell the truth. So nnich for genealogy, to which 
I may never refer, perhaps, again. 

No, I did not go to Maine to see my cousins. 
I went there on my way to New Hampshire to 
see, if you please, on those mountains the geo- 
logical order of its stratification. In the year 1841 
I was appointed as a junior member on the New 
Hampshire Geological Survey, under the emi- 
nent Charles Thomas Jackson, who is better 
known as one of the discoverers of the properties 
of ether. On my way to join this survey I went 
down to Portland and made a visit on my life- 
long friend Samuel Longfellow. He is tlu> Long- 
fellow to whom you owe some of the best hymns 
in your hymn-l)ook; for instance, he wrotc^ the 
hymn for my ordination. He graduated with me 



THE STATE OF MAINE 



29 



at Cambridge in 1839. And we of our class used 
to call the celebrated Henry Wadsworth Long- 
fellow the 
brother of the 
''Poet Long- 
fellow/' mean- 
ing that he was 
brother to our 
Sam. 

This narra- 
tive should 
really begin 
with a voyage 
down Portland 
Harbor in a 
boat piloted 

by Sam Longfellow and me. He and I and 
Channing, who had asked for my appointment 
on the New Hampshire Survey, were intimate 
in college. 

From college days down I liked Channing and 
Channing liked me. In November, 1838, he pro- 
posed that we should watch from midnight 




Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 



30 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

onward for the annual recurrence of the meteoric 
shower which is now generally called the shower 
of the Leonids. And we did so, eight of us of 
the college class of 1839, on the Delta of those 
days. What says the poem of that day ? 

Our Chase and our Channing 
The Northwest are scanning, 
While the cold wind is fanning 

Their faces upturned, 
While our Hurd and our Hale, 
With watching turned pale, 
Are looking toward Yale 

Where all these things burned. 
And Morison and Parker 
Cry out to the marker, 
" One jet black and darker 

From zenith above." 
While Adams and I>ongfellow, 
Watching the throng below, 
Won't all night long allow 

Black meteors move. 

All the rest of us insisted that there were black 
meteors as well as white ones. ' This opinion 
has been confirmed since then. Our observa- 



THE STATE OF MAINE ' 31 

tory was a square table, just where the statue 
of Jolin Harvard sits in bronze to-day. North, 




Judge Stephen Longfellow. 

Father of Heury Wadsworth and Samuel Longfellow. 

From a painting. 

south, east, and west of the table were four 
chairs, facing in those directions, and in them 
sat four of the club. A fifth, with a lantern on 



32 TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the table, recorded the observations. If any one 
wants to see them, he can look in Silliman's 
Journal of the next January, or in the Bulletins 
of the Astronomical Department of the French 
Academy of Sciences. That was my first appear- 
ance on that august record. The little club of 
observers called itself the Octagon Club. Chase 
afterwards won distinction as a mathematician. 
Morison was Provost of the Peabody Library at 
Baltimore, Adams distinguished himself as a 
lawyer before his early death, Longfellow was the 
preacher and hymn-writer, and Parker and Ilurd 
every man's friends. We have never printed till 
now their ''Octagonal Scribblings." 

And so in 1841 Channing came into my school- 
room one day and asked me to join him as a 
subaltern in the Geological Survey of New 
Hampshire, under Jackson. And, so I did. If 
this series ever passes Maine, and the reader and I 
should get into New Hampshire together, I will 
tell of those experiences. But now, as I have 
said, ]\Iaine is the first on the list, and with Maine 
we will begin. 



THE STATE OF MAmE 33 

To start on this expedition I went to Portland. 
Then with Longfellow I crossed the southwest 
corner of Maine, that I might join Channing. In 
the expedition which followed we ascended 
Mount Washington, as this reader shall hear when 
we come to New Hampshire. So, naturally 
enough, four years after, he proposed to me that 
we should try the highest mountain in Maine and 
ascend Mount Katahdin. Before the reader is 
twenty years older the ascent of Katahdin and 
the exploration of the Maine lakes will be among 
the most interesting incidents of familiar summer 
travel in America. 

But of Maine I knew nothing but the Sebago 
Lake and the Fryeburg road till I went there 
with this same William Francis Channing for this 
Katahdin expedition, as my father had gone to 
New Hampshire to ascend Mount Washington. 

I am writing soon after Channing's death, and 
I am tempted to say that while he is remembered 
as a distinguished electrician, it is a wonder to 
some of us that he never became one of the most 
distinguished men of his time. He was what is 



34 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

now called a physicist of remarkable resources. 
He had studied with Dr. Robert Hare, who is still 
remembered among the fathers of science in 
America, the inventor of the oxyhydrogen I3I0W- 
pipe. Channing had early taken up the business 
of harnessing electricity. He is the author of 
the fire alarm, now in use in all our cities. 

A wizard of such dreaded fame, 
That when, in Salamanca's cave, 
Hiip listed his magic wand to wave. 

The bells would ring in Notre Dame. 

Indeed, in many lines his early experiments in 
electricity led the way for those who have given 
to us the electrical inventions of to-day. I count 
it as a great misfortune for him that as a little 
boy he was taken to Europe to school. But 
Fellenberg was a great apostle of education then ; 
his school at Hofwyl, now forgotten, was the 
Mecca of educators. For those were the days 
when even sensible people really thought that 
people could be instructed into the kingdom 
of heaven, or practically that if you knew your 




c ^ 






35 



THE STATE OF MAINE 37 

multiplication table well enough, all else would 
follow. 

Poor little Will Channing, in those early ex- 
periences at Hofwyl, lost in childhood the joy and 
delight, so necessary to the children of God, of 
easy intercourse with his fellow-men. There 
was always a certain aloofness about him which 
made him unhappy. It is not nice to be on the 
outside margin of any circle of mankind. Here 
is, for better, for worse, my explanation of the 
reason why his name does not stand higher than 
it does among the men of his generation. 

I think he and I were the first persons who had 
ascended Mount Katahdin with scientific tastes 
and for any scientific purpose. My dear friend 
Professor Asa Gray had told me that it was de- 
sirable to have specimens of the Alpine vegeta- 
tion there, that it might be compared with that 
of Mount Washington. I was able to send him 
more than twenty varieties on my return. 

We consulted with Dr. Jackson, who had been 
our old chief in New Hampshire, and Dr. Jackson 
had said, in his offhand way, that, passing across 



38 TARKY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Maine from the coal of Nova Scotia and the 
limestone of Thomaston, we should come to primi- 
tive rock in Mount Katahdin, and that the 
eastern half of the state of Maine thus presented 
in very short distances specimens of all the strati- 
fications of the earth's surface from the oldest 
time to our own. The remark has not nuich 
scientific interest, but I have always treasured it 
as a very good aid to memory as to what Maine 
is. You can see the beaver l)uild his hut at the 
north end of Maine, and the next day you can see 
the Fine Arts Department of Bowdoin College, 
which is as good a type of the best modern life 
as you could choose. So you can pass from 
primitive rock to the latest Tertiary. 

Dr. W. 0. Crosby, who knows much more about 
the matter than Dr. Jackson ever pretended to 
know, says to me, "Between Nova Scotia or 
Thomaston and Mount Katahdin we have forma- 
tions covering a wide range of geological time 
and including some of the oldest as well as the 
very newest." 

If any one is curious about Katahdin, I refer 




H O" 



o ■;; 



? < 



5 ^ 



39 



THE STATE OF MAINE 41 

him to the magazine Appalachia of April, 1901, 
where I have printed my journal of the time 
of that ascent. I have said thus much of it by 
way of inducing readers to make this excursion. 

Very simply, the heart of Maine is 'Hhe Lake 
Country" of the eastern United States, precisely 
as Minnesota is ''the Lake Country" of the 
Mississippi Valley, and as we talk of the Lake 
Country of England when we go to Windermere. 
No man knows Nev/ England as seen by his own 
eye who has not sat on the higher summits of 
Katahdin. In Thoreau's books there will be 
found an account of his ascent. And, not to 
occupy more space here, I like to say that the 
adventure which shall take any man up the Ken- 
nebec by such of its head waters as come from 
the north, so that he thus may strike the route 
of Arnold's detachment of 1775, makes a very 
interesting journey. When Mr. Jared Sparks 
made that journey in his varied historical research, 
they told him that no traveller had gone through 
that way since Arnold's men passed by. Or if 
you will go up to Houlton, which was a mihtary 



42 TARRY AT HOINIE TRAVELS 

})Ost in the carl}' i)art of the last oentuiy, you will 
now find a beautiful modern city with the best 
appliances. Indeed, Aroostook County, of which 
Houlton is the shire town, is so prosperous a region 
that they told nic when I was last there that there 
was not an empty house in the county. I know 
I found schools with the very latest advantages 
both in lloulton and Fort Fairfield. And yet, 
as I said just now, beavers are building their dams 
in the wilderness there. 

The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of the year 
1842 settled the old boundary controversy between 
this country and England, which had existed for 
nearly sixty years. IMr. Webster and Lord 
Ashburton were the negotiators, but as the terri- 
tory in question belonged wholl}' to the states 
of Maine and Massachusetts, Mr. Webster had 
present at Washington four commissioners from 
Maine, three from IVIassachusetts, and also my 
father, Nathan Hale, as his ])ersonal friend, 
because my father had given sj^ecial attention to 
the boundary question. There were thus ten 
persons in all who discussed the subject together. 



THE STATE OF MAINE 43 

When it was all over, Lord Ashburton told my 
father that of the ten, he, the English delegate, 
was the only one who had ever been in the 




James Bowdoin. 

After the painting by Gilbert Stuart in the Walker Art Building, 

Bowdoin College. 

territory surrendered. When he was Mr. Baring, 
he crossed it on a jovniiey between Quebec and 
Halifax. The route of the New Brunswick and 



44 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Canada Railway now passes from the southeast 
to the northwest through the territory which we 
conceded to England. 

Half-fashionable America knows now how in- 
teresting is the region where New England was 
first settled by the French in 1602. For there is 
no better central point from which to explore 
that region than Bar Harbor. And Bar Harbor is 
very near Dr. Palfrey's sacred parallel of forty-five 
degrees north. Eastport has some curious history 
relating to the long period when it was under 
English government in the War of 1812. It is 
the only proper American city which has ever 
been for a long time in the military possession 
of a foreign power. 

But this paper is not written as if it were a 
guide liook. It is rather as if I met you, Gentle 
Reader, in a palace car as you and Mrs. Reader 
and the children were speeding eastward from the 
heats of Baltimore and Philadelphia, and had 
made up your mind to go as far as you could 
under the Stars and Stripes. I hope I should not 
lay out a route for you. I am trying to tell you 



THE STATE OF MAIXE 45 

what are your opportunities in a state which in 
the continent of Europe would make a very 
decent empire. Forests and game? Oh, yes. 
Take the ''Flyer" which the Aroostook Rail- 
road people give you, and you will suppose that 
man was made for nothing but to shoot deer or 
moose in the wilderness. Or here is another 
''Flyer" which will tell you about matchless 
salmon and salmon trout and the rest of the fishy 
literature. What I want you to understand 
about Maine is that these people are well poised, 
well educated, proud, and well satisfied with the 
place where they are. 

It was my duty once to appoint the cliief of a 
new industrial school. Almost of course, I con- 
sulted Samuel Chapman Armstrong, ''the first 
citizen of America," who was at the head of the 
Hampton Institute. He said at once, "Go to 
jMaine^ and you are almost sure to find the 
man you want there." He specified their State 
College at Orono, but he went farther to say that 
in ]\laine they had the fine nobility of New Eng- 
land blood, with the simple habits of the old 



46 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



New Englander and the New Englander's deter- 
mination to excel the rest of mankind. Presi- 
dent Robbins, of the Waltham Watch Company, 
once told me that once a year he sent an accom- 
plished lady into 
the upper valley 
of the Kennebec, 
and that she 
stayed there a 
month or two en-, 
listing a party 
of well-educated 
young women 
w ho s h o u 1 d 
come back with 
her to Waltham 
in Massachu- 
setts. It is thus, 
gentle reader, 
that your Waltham watch is one of a company 
of a million or two, one of which on one happy 
day once corrected the standard of Greenwich 
Observatory. 




William DeWitt Hyde, D.D. 
President of Bowdoiii College since 1885. 



THE STATE OF MAINE 47 

I spoke just now of beavers at the north and 
of the picture gallery in Bowdoin College which 
is within smell of the ocean on the south. Do 
not go up to the north to kill beavers, but you 
may make yourself a ''camp" there and stay 
a fortnight while you watch their sensible enter- 
prises. Or go down to the Commencement at 
Bowdoin and find 3'ourself in the midst of their 
traditions of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Andrew, 
Chandler, Packard, and Upham, or in that fresh 
present life which Dr. Hyde leads so well. 

I loitered there one day to study the crayons 
and other drawings which the younger Bowdoin 
brought from Spain and from Italy. I had 
never seen that collection rivalled excepting one 
day when Ruskin showed me somewhat similar 
portfolios in English Oxford, and I cannot help 
wishing that somebody, even now, would give 
us a study of the lives of the two Bowdoins, 
father and son. Here was the Governor of 
Massachusetts who, under the name of the 
''President of the Council," "ran Massachusetts" 
from 1775 till 1780, and afterwards succeeded 



48 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Hancock us Governor. Here was his son who 
was travclhng in Europe when Lexington called 
him home. He was one of om' early diplomatists, 
and he became the benefactor of Bowdoin Col- 
lege. He left his library, his philosophical re- 
ports, and his paintings, with six thousand 
acres of land and the reversion of the island 
of Naushon, to this College. His mineralogical 
collection was the nucleus of the cabinets which 
Professor Cleveland studied and illustrated. 

Ah ! here is one of my failures to put the right 
thread into the right needle at the right time. 
It must be twenty years ago that I was the 
guest of the College for some function, and had 
the pleasure of sitting at the Commencement 
dinner. Dr. Packard was presiding, loved and 
honored by everybody who knew him. James 
Gillespie Blaine was at the height of his fame, 
and admired and loved by everybody in that 
asseml^ly. And when he was called upon to 
speak he spoke with all that personal charm 
which belonged to his speeches when he was 
talking of that which really interested him. He 



THE STATE OF MAINE 



49 



characterized Dr. Packard to his face, and, to 
our dehght, told us what manner of man he 
was. With an old reporter's instinct, I seized 




Professor Alpheus Spring Packard. 

After the painting by F. P. Vinton in the Walker Art Building, 

Bowdoin College. 

the printed menu at my side and began writing 
on the back the words as they fell from his lips; 
but in an instant more some Philistine voice said 
within me: ''Why do jow do this? There are 



50 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

six reporters at their table eagc^-l}' taking it 
better than you could." And I laid my pencil 
by. Alas and alas ! there was some football 
match at Princeton or at Harlem that day. 
The l)lue pencil of all editorial offices struck out 
Mr. Blaine's address for the more important 
details of a touchdown by Smith when Jones 
had dropped the ball in the gravel, and so that 
speech was lost. Before the week was over Dr. 
Packard had died, and I have been left with the 
wish that on a great occasion I had done what 
I wanted to do and could do. 

Moral. — It is always better to do a thing 
than not to do it, if you remember duly the 
Twelve Commandments. 

Yes, if there were room to talk of people, 
there are many, many men who won their laurels 
in Maine who deserve a place in any Hall of 
Fame: Champlain, whose monument is his own 
lake; Baron Castine, whose life is a romance; 
Knox, who "created all the stores of war" and 
has left behind him men and women for whom 
we are all grateful (he went down to Maine and 




General Henry Knox. 
From the painting by Charles Willson Feale in the Old State House, 
Philadelphia. 



THE STATE OF MAINE 53 

opened up Knox County after his last shotted 
cannon had been fired at Yorktown) ; Lincoln, 
Washington's friend and sometimes his adviser; 
or, in these later days, Evans, Fessenden, James 
G. Blaine, and my own chief. Senator Frye, the 
President to-day of the United States Senate/ 
There is an excellent story which I can re- 
peat nearly correctly, though I was not on the 
spot where the speech was made. Our Senator 
Frye was to address the assembly which met 
when a stone library building was consecrated, 
which had been erected to the memory of Mrs. 
Washburne in Livermore by her sons. Before 
the address Mr. Frye had been in the old Wash- 
burne mansion house. This gave him a chance 
to say that he had seen that day the cradle in 
which she had rocked three governors, four 
members of the House of Representatives, two 
senators in the United States Senate, two 
ministers plenipotentiary, one major-general in 
the army, and one captain in the navy. This 
is a long catalogue, but if the reader will study 

I 1904. 



54 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the lives of Elihii B. Washburne, of W. B. Wash- 
buriie, Israel \\'ashbiirne, and Caj)tain S. W. 
Washburne, he can fill out the blanks in Mr. 
Frye's catalogue. 

How one would like to show how near these men 
and other Maine men have been to the centres 
of our American life ! Bowdoin College in her 
list of alimini counts Hawthorne, Henry Long- 
fellow, Dr. Cleveland, both Hamlins and Packard 
and the Chandlers, Carroll Everett, and Governor 
Andrew and so many more. Let me speak of 
the Greenlcafs of Huguenot blood, who came from 
Newburyport after the war and settled on the 
upper Penobscot. Of them is Simon Greenleaf, 
the jurist, and Moses Greenleaf, who made the 
map of IMaine on the wall yonder. His son was 
my dear and near friend, my other self, may I 
say ? — Frederic William Greenleaf, who died in 
1852. I was thirty, and he a year or two older. 
He is the Harry Wadsworth of my l)ook, "Ten 
Times One is Ten." 

I spoke above of my first visit in Portland. 
The Longfellow house on Main Street is pre- 



THE STATE OF MAIKE 55 

served, one is so glad to say in this age of destruc- 
tion. ^Mien I was first there, Judge Longfellow 
was still alive. He had served the state to great 




The Longfellow House in Portland. 



purpose; perhaps he did not know then how his 
name was going down to the next century. My 
Samuel Longfellow must have been born in 1819. 
I saw him first on an August morning in 1835, 
at about six o'clock in the morning. I had 
ridden to Cambridge from Boston in what Dr. 



56 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Holmes would have called a ''one-horse shay/' 
to be examined for admittance at the College. 
Almost at the moment when we arrived, my 
brother and I, in front of " University," two 
more chaises arrived, both of them, as it proved, 
from the ''State of Maine," so simple were the 
arrangements of those days. In one of them was 
Francis Brown Hayes, my friend from that hour 
till he died. In the other was Samuel Longfellow, 
of whom I may say the same. He was my grooms- 
man when I was married; he wrote the hymn 
for my ordination. North and south, east and 
west, we always corresponded with each other. 
He was one of those, as I have said, who sat 
where John Harvard now sits, counting the shoot- 
ing stars. It was he and I who took that voyage 
of which I have si)()ken when we counted the 
islands in Casco Bay. It is queer that I should 
say this of myself, but it was almost the first 
time I had ever been in a boat, though I was 
nineteen years old. From that time till his death 
he went on, loyal and brave, without spot or 
blemish or any such thing, loving and loved. He 




Hon. Elihu B. Washburne. 
Secretary of State and Minister to France 1869-77. 



57 



THE STATE OF MAINE 59 

had seen the vision and he walked with God. He 
came perfectly naturally into our calling of the 
ministry. Wherever he was he made a circle of 
youngsters who loved him ■ and perhaps wor- 
shipped him, and so he lifted them into the 
Higher Life. 

When I made that visit, his charming sisters 
were in the home. One of them, who left us not 
long ago, married into the Greenleaf family. 

I think Henry Longfellow was there at the 
same time. I have tried to express in public 
once and again the blessing which he brought 
to Harvard College. I mark its history with a 
line for the day when he came there, only twenty- 
nine years old. Since that day teacher and 
pupil, professor and undergraduate, have . been 
of one heart and one soul. Up till that time 
the etiquette required that a professor should .not 
recognize the existence of a pupil in the College 
yard. Since that time it has been ive who are 
going to do this, ice who have done that, freshman 
and dean are all one in the "honorable company 
of letters." For here was this young fellow. 



GO TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Henry Longfellow, who was not only to teach 
us but to quicken us and inspire us and make us 
glad that we were admitted into the secrets of 
learning and literature. Pie would walk with us 
when we took our constitutional, he would play 
a game of whist with us if we met together at 
Mrs. Eliot's. He changed the routine of his part 
of the College from the routine of the class room 
to the courtesies and cordialities of a parlor. 

And it would take a volume to record what 
Longfellow was in the amenities and charities 
of home life. Till he died that old Washington 
house of his at Cambridge was, one might say, 
the trysting-place of every tramp from France, 
or Spain, or Bohemia, or Mesopotamia, or the parts 
of Libya around Cyrene, who could not speak 
the English language, and who wanted bread 
for his mouth and clothes for his back. And not 
one of these beggars was ever turned away. I be- 
lieve I never knew but one nobleman of sixteen 
quarterings. After the days when exiles could 
return home, he died in his castle on the Danube 
where his grandfather's grandfather had been born. 



THE STATE OF MAINE 61 

This man was introduced to me by Henry Long- 
fellow, whom he knew because he had gone to him 




James G. Blaine. 
From a photograph hy Sarony. 



starving and half naked, in need of everything, 
and with no claim upon Longfellow but that he 
had suffered with Kossuth in his country's cause. 



62 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Tliey tell me that there arc more English men 
and English women who read and know Long- 
fellow's verses than tlu^'e are who read and know 
Tennyson's in the same island. I do not know 
if this is so. But I can see that it might be so. 
It is a great thing to be the poet of the People. 
Do you remember how Dr. Holmes reminded us 
that Isaac Watts is quoted twenty times every 
day for once when a line of Pope or Dryden is 
repeated ? 

But we are to look in at the windows of other 
places, upon the faces of other people, and for 
the moment we must bid good-by to the state of 
Maine. 

''And you have come so far," said one of the 
readers of this chapter when it was first printed, 
''and you have said nothing about the 'Maine 
Law'?" Yet it is that law which has given the 
name of Maine to the world of English-speaking 
people, and half the people who will ever speak 
to me about Maine will speak to me to ask about 
it. Very well, this is no place to discuss its theory 
or to go into the details of practice; it will be 



THE STATE OF MAINE 



63 



enough if I repeat^ what is true, what this same 
James Gillespie Blaine said of the Maine Law, 
" It found Maine a poor state and it left her a 
rich one." 




ATHYOHjU'S iXLMSCM through f/ir WIIliUElRJSlESS 
The Amairnns vnd/T Ccn.jfmold , pfnetr/iffd ihourjh an unrxpUrfd Wilderr 
ness to Quebfc. in the Fall of 177 J. afttr sircre difiiculties and privatunu 

From an Old Print 



CHAPTER III 
NEW HAMPSHIRE 

Persons or places? Why, both persons and 
places, if you please, gentle reader. If you 
please, for places we can go up to the Tip Top 
House on Mount Washington, which, l)efore we 
knew of the North Carolina mountains, we 
called the highest land east of the Mississippi. 
Or for persons we can go to Graduation 
Day at Exeter and see the young American 
who means to sway the rod of empire in 
1935. 

And here am I, your guide and mentor. The 
first time I stood at the Tip Top House was at 
ten o'clock at night in the first week of Septem- 
ber, 1841, with a crowbar in my hand as I pressed 
upon the door. It was after a tramp from Ran- 
dolph which had lasted seventeen hours and had 
taken us over Jefferson and through one or two 

64 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 



65 



thunderstorms. The last time I arrived there I was 
with an old friend on the back seat of a victoria, 
v/ith four horses before us who had trotted most 
of the way from the Alpine House. And the at- 




MuUNT WASHINdTUN, AND THE WhITE HiLLS. 

(From near Crawford's.) 
From an engraving of about the time of Dr. Hale's first ascent. 

tentive keeper of the Tip Top House ran forward. 
''Is this you, Dr. Hale? I am so sorry you 
are just too late for our dinner, but you shall 
have something to eat by the time you are 
ready. Would you rather have hot chops, or 
would you rather have some tenderloin steak? 



GG TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

We will make you as comfortable as we can." 
This is what happens when fifty years go by. 
And literally one of my last visits in New Hamp- 
shire was on that day, a pathetic day as it proved, 
which Exeter boys will long remember. We 
dedicated to good learning and high patriotism 
two noble buildings which George Shattuck Mori- 
son had cared for and for which I l^elieve he paid, 
— George Morison, the king of American engineers. 
He died a few weeks after, leaving for us two or 
three leading studies of American duty which 
must not be forgotten. 

Yes, it is just as it was in Maine. You can 
box the compass. Things ? If you want things, 
you can have them on a large scale. Men ? If 
you want men, why, we have Daniel Webster. 
We will not say in this connection here, we have 
Franklin Pierce. On a small scale, remember 
that somewhere I have said something of a 
baby three months of age who was attended by 
Mrs. Jeremiah Smith when she was Miss Hale, 
a charming girl of seventeen, who came to visit 
my dear mother in the public house of Dover. 



KEW HAMPSHIRE 67 

My father, with some scientific friends, was at 
that moment attacking ^Hhe Notch," as we used 
to call it, as if there were no other, and ascend- 
ing by the early pioneer path to the summit of 
Mount Washington. Year by year people found 
out how attractive all that region is. 

To me, personally, after I saw it on the Geo- 
logical Survey of New Hampshire in 1841, it be- 
came a duty as it became a privilege to go up 
every summer and thread those forests again. 
The glory of forests is more than the glory of 
mountains. I remember I used to say that if 
the time came of a summer when I did not want 
to go to New Hampshire, I knew I was out of 
order somehow and ought to go. And with the 
first two minutes of forest life Nature asserted 
herself and I was well again. 

If any one wants to travel in New Hampshire 
and see the central wonders as they revealed 
themselves to Darby Field, that original Irish- 
man who came up here in 1642, let him make 
roughly on the margin of this page the letter M. 



68 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



Then, if he is a New Yorker, he may say: 
''I will go up by the vertical stroke of the left 
hand of the M, antl I there come to Bethlehem. 
I will go down from Bethlehem through the 
Notch till I come to Intervale. I will go up 




Thk Dixville Notch. 
From ;i ph()t(>.i;r;ii)h t'opyright, 1900, by the Detroit Pliotographii- Co. 

again from Intervale by Pinkham's Notch to 
Gorham and the Alpine House, and then I will 
go down on the right-hand vertical of the M 
and I shall come to vSebago Pond and beau- 
tiful Bridgton, and go to Portland, the most 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 69 

charming of New England cities excepting 
Burlington." 

Now, if he choose, he may go down from 
Bethlehem through the valley of the Pemige- 
wasset. He may go up to Waterville, highest 
inhabited land in New England. He may go 
down to Squam Lake, and see my boys on Harry 
Sawyer's farm ; he may cruise on Winnepesaukee 
as long as he chooses, and he may go across on foot 
or on his donkey through Tamworth, Conway, 
and again to Intervale. He will find Intervale 
a good centre with memories of old artist days. 

But there are other regions to be traversed. 
You must not venture to talk about New Hamp- 
shire till you have been through the Dixville 
Notch. If you have the real Bohemian spirit in 
you, you will take a birch canoe (which, believe 
me, is better than a cedar) at Connecticut 
Lake, the head of Connecticut River. ^ Why not 
look in on Senator Spooner if the Senate has 

^ This is as good a place as any to say that Connecticut 
means a long tidal river, and that the experts spell it quinneh- 
tukqut. Winthrop bought corn in the Connecticut Valley the 
first year after his people came here. 



70 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



adjourned? You will come out sunburnt and 
strong at Saybrook on Long Island Sound. 
Or, after three or four weeks of happy adven- 
ture on Connecticut River, you will go across 
to Rangeley and try there for salmon trout or 



■ 


^^ 


r" 


'1^^ 




it' •■■' 






•>< 



On the Presidential Rancie. 

for salmon. You will find one or two Senators 
there; or you will study the grandeur of their 
Lake Country there; or j^ou will wander in the 
quarries of granite which are just on the eastern 
side of the line of Maine, but more accessible 
from New Hampshire. 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 71 

At Diana's Bath, or Pigwacket, there is much 
which Pan and the Oreads and Naiads have to 
show you ; and, as the Pope says of Rome, after 
you have been with us some years, you will find 
that you know nothing. 

And now as for Men, on the other hand. These 
people always had a sturdy habit of their own. 
We people in Boston Bay sent them into exile 
when we made an end of Anne Hutchinson and 
the other Mystics and Progressives of her time. 
For the first and the last time in New England, 
what men now call a Presbytery sat on the First 
Church in Boston in 1636, and the Common- 
wealth was foolish enough to send into exile the 
most intelligent members of that Church in 
Boston, and left only a few dozen at home to 
pick up the pieces and make Boston out of them 
as well as they could. So these people, whose 
names are Maude, Wheelwright, and Pormort, 
among others, with a half-dozen more, went 
beyond the Massachusetts line to Exeter and 
Dover and Portsmouth. I may say, in passing, 
that they pronounced Portsmouth as if it were 



72 



TAREY AT HOME TRAVELS 



Porchmouth, and their true descendants speak so 
to this day. It was Strawberry Bank then. 

Well, sometimes these exiles wanted the strong 
arm of Massachusetts to help them, and then 

they always 
had i t. A n 
ancestor of 
mine, Captain 
John Everett, 
com m a n d e d 
the train-bands 
of Massachu- 
setts Bay there 
for a genera- 
t i n when 
Jesuits and Al- 
gonquins were 
too much for 
the settlers. 
But, on the 
other hand, whenever they chose, they had an 
assembly of their own and did very much as they 
pleased, and I think that is their habit to this day. 




Eleaz.vr Wheelock. 

From a paintinij in the possession of 

Dartmouth College. 



XEW ha:\ipshire 73 

Among other pieces of independence was the 
revohition in the great Democratic party, by 
which in 1843 and 1844 Xew Hampshire became 
the first in point of time of .\merican states to 
make an anti-slaverj' platform, while up to that 
time, in a spirit of local independence, she had 
always chosen to give a Democratic vote and so 
to ally herself to the Southern hierarchy. ^Mien 
it came to the amiexation of Texas, however, the 
Democrats of Xew Hampsliire said ''Xo!" and 
instead of voting steadily in the Southern coluimi, 
they went over and laid the advance for freedom. 

One of the pioneers, whose name, Eleazar 
AMieelock, is hardly remembered, took it into 
his head before the American Revolution to 
found a college which was to be especially for 
the "education of Indians for the service of 
Christ." ]\lr. Edwin D. ]\Iead reminds me that 
"\Mieelock was educated at X'^ew Haven as one 
of the scholars who were there supported by 
Berkeley's bounty. It was thus, as it proved, 
that Berkeley established his American college. 
" Westward the star of empire takes its way." 



74 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Wheelock went to England, and there he found 
favor with Lord Dartmouth, the one member of 
Lord North's Cabinet who was ^'pure, peace- 
able, gentle, and easy to be entreated, given to 
mercy and good works, without partiality and 
without hypocrisy." And the Earl of Dartmouth 
was good to the Indian apostle, who named his 
college Dartmouth College in his memory. In a 
diary of that century I find it called Dresden Col- 
lege. They tell me that while I write,^ the present 
Earl of Dartmouth is girding on his armor and pre- 
paring to take an ocean voyage to see the Dart- 
mouth College of to-day. ''A little college," 
Daniel Webster said. ''But she has children who 
love her." ■ 

Portsmouth? Yes. All of you have read 
Miss Jewett's novel, ''The Tory Lover," or if 
you have not, you will thank me for telling you 
to do so. There you get a bit of Paul Jones, and 
in Mr. Buell's history, which reveals so much to 

^ Since the words were written above, the Earl of Dartmouth 
has made his auspicious visit to Dartmouth College. The new 
generation was delighted to honor him, and he and his party 
have left the most agreeable remembrances behind them. 




Lord Dartmouth. 
From a painting in the possession of Dartmontli College. 



76 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 77 

us, you have Paul Jones at greater length and so 
at much greater advantage. What a pity it is 
that we have lost Mr. Buell just as we discovered 
that we had another historian ! In their en- 
thusiasm for Paul Jones the Continental Congress 
ordered that the plan should be drawn and the 
timber collected with which to build a ship of 
the line, America, which was to be the flagship 
of this great American seaman. No more rotten 
Poor Richards for him. He shall have an Ameri- 
can ship built from American woods for an 
American seaman. Thirty-two years before, 
Portsmouth had built a frigate America for the 
English navy, but we shall have an America 
of our own. The new ship of the line was just 
about finished, I have a right to say probably 
the finest vessel of her class in the world, when 
the French king's ship, the Magnifique, ran 
against a rock in Boston Harbor and sank. I 
am afraid her bones are there to this day. And 
the fickle Congress forgot its own Admiral, gave 
the America to ''our illustrious ally," and 
McCarthy, commander of the Magnifique, took 



78 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

his siiilors down to Portsmouth to superintend 
her fitting for the ocean. Here I have his Log 
Book of those days, if you would only read it, 
but, alas ! you do not care for history. 

Her after history is given to me very kindly 
by Mr. Gauss, of our Navy Department. It 
appears that in 1793 she sailed under Admiral 
Sercy from Brest for Santo Domingo, to convoy 
loaded merchant vessels ready to return to 
France. This and other ships of the French 
navy were detained in the West Indies, owing 
to the insurrection in Santo Domingo and other 
causes, until June 24, 1793, when Admiral Sercy 
started out with his fleet. Some of them are 
mentioned by name as coming to the United 
States ports for supplies, and some are named 
as reaching Brest late in November, 1793. The 
next summer, on the celebrated first of June, 
when Lord Howe beat the French squadron off 
Ushant, she was taken into the British navy and 
named the Impetueiix. This change was made 
because they had already an America. The 
French ship Impetueux, which had been taken 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 



79 



at Ushant, had been burned at Portsmouth, 
England, and her name Impetueux was given to 
this larger America in commemoration of the 
French ship. 

As L' Impetueux she became a favorite ship 
in the English navy. 
They told me at the 
Admiralty that 
when Lord Ex- 
mouth (Sir Edward 
Pellew) was to com- 
mand the fleet, he 
chose L' Impetueux 
as his flagship. 

All this I have 
said in such detail 
because the late Mr. 
Bueil, in his invalu- 
able life of Paul Jones, had been misled. He 
says that King Louis changed the name of our 
America into the Franklin. Now, the Franklin 
was the ship captured at Aboukir by Lord Nelson. 
She was considered the finest two-deck ship in 




John Paul Jones. 
From the original miniature in the 
United States Naval Institute, An- 
napolis, Md. 



80 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the world, but she is not our America. And it is a 
pity that this mistake should have worked its 
way into literature. Our American Impetueux 
is sometimes rated as a seventy-four-gun ship 
and sometimes as seventy-eight. 

But poor Paul Jones was left lamenting be- 
cause we wanted to make a present to ''our 
illustrious ally." 

In my own earlier days, camping for a night 
under a white pine and an open sky, I remember 
an old forester told me that he had seen the 
broad arrow of King George on pines in that 
forest which were too far from water to be carried 
to the Merrimac. I think it quite likely that 
some old Appalachian may find King George's 
broad arrow at this day. 

The Appalachian Clul) of New England is an 
excellent club. Scmiramis says that it is the 
only club in Boston which has a real raison 
d'etre. Perhaps this is true. Anyway, it brings 
together young men and maidens, wise men and 
people who know as little as I do, but who love 
the open air, who are not afraid to be alone with 




NEW HAMPSHIRE 81 

God, and so are willing, if need be, to lie on hem- 
lock boughs with a fire burning a cord of wood 
at one's feet, and look up on the sky. Now this 
Appalachian Club does not satisfy itself with ster- 
eoscopic pictures in winter or sonnets addressed 
to robin redbreasts or the starry canopy. But 
it sends into the wilderness such men as Mr. 
Edmands, and as my friends the 
Lowes, to make paths to and es- 
stablish camps and leave water- 
mugs for the benefit of wayfarers, 
and sometimes an enthusiast ^""^ ^^^"'^ ^^''^^• 
gives them a few cents or a few dollars with 
which to buy a few pine trees to preserve them 
for posterity. Blessings on the Appalachian 
Club, and blessings on the Forestry Association 
of New Hampshire ! Let the reader reflect that 
the Soracte mines gave him ten per cent last 
month instead of seven, and let him send that 
extra three per cent which he does not know 
what to do with to the treasurer of the Appala- 
chian and bid him buy a little l)it of pine forest 
for the benefit of the reader's great-grandson 



82 TAERY AT HOME TPwVVELS 

in 1975, and let that great-grandson take this 
volume out from the library and thank me for 
the suggestion. 

Do not fear to come up here from New Padua, 
from Baltimore, from Knoxville, from New 
Orleans, or from Waco. We have a fine set of 
guides, who know what they are about, who 
neither drink, nor swear, nor steal, nor play 
"high-low," but who love to make you love the 
forests and the mountains. Let it be for only 
twenty-four hours if you please, or let it be for 
six months if you please. Put yourself fairly 
into the forest reserve, to see what there is to 
be seen, to eat what there is to eat, to do what 
there is to do, and to enjoy all there is to enjoy, 
and then 3^ou will not need to read our papers 
on New Hampshire. 

And, not to let this chapter pass without say- 
ing something of persons as well as places, let 
me counsel my pupil to spend time enough at 
Dartmouth College to imderstand what is the 
charm that it has for everybody. It is under 
the direction of one of the first educators of our 




83 



NEW HAMPSHIEE 



85 



time, Dr. Tucker. From the time of John 
Ledyard (who is now forgotten, as he ought not 
to be) to these days, when so many of our ac- 
tive statesmen hark back to their happy years 
at Dartmouth, it 
has been gaining on 
the right hand and 
on the left hand, 
above and below, 
behind and before. 
Never were more 
august ceremonies 
than those of the 
hundredth anniver- 
sary of Daniel Web- 
ster's Commence- 
ment. Never have 
people loved their 
Alma Mater more than Webster did, than Choate 
did, or Ticknor, or Field, or some of these younger 
men who are on the stage to-day. With great good 
sense, the government of the College manages 
to connect its scientific school with the necessities 




Dr. William Jewett Tucker. 
President of Dartmouth College. 



86 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

of the times. With great good sense, they have 
administered their College so that study and 
learning, science and literature, are still the fash- 
ion as the foundation there. 

This is a good place to repeat the story which 
the late Senator Patterson told me upon the 
spot. He took me to the magnificent elm which 
stands at one corner of the open common in 
Hanover and made me remark the exquisite 
beauty of twenty or more branches as they rise 
and curve and l:)end toward the ground. It is 
one of the noble specimens of the American elm 
which justifies well Michaux's remark that the 
American elm is queen of the forests of the world. 
Mr. Patterson told me that w.hen he himself was 
a student he assisted one of the professors who 
bound together a number of little elms, each as 
big as your thumb perhaps, and planted them 
together in this corner of the quadrangle. They 
have grown together and are now one tree. 

As for the Academy at Exeter, it won its 
honors early, and it holds them with pride to 
this day. One of the Phillipses of Andover 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 



87 



endowed the school, and he builded a great deal 
better than he knew. No boys are better fitted 
for college than its pupils are. And the reason 
is that somehow the true democratic principle 
has intrenched itself there, and a fellow is really 



^HHE- -' 










iteJOid 


w^3m. 


:'«4Aii 


^ ^^ . Jf^Mf^ 


Wll 


S^^^^K^ 




4 


m 




it. 




■^: 


■ :-f'^.:' 




i^', 


■ '-"^^^^ 






M 


. "^ ■ 


- ."■ i"' 










^■^■"i 






_;.'■,■ 


^' 


'.ft .5 






'1 




% 




'1 


i. 






1 


b«^^ 


■ 


'-^^ 


■a wsm 


L 


^'■.^-.Ja 


il 


t^^BP 


«fit^ftSMiii*i 


1 


t;;;,-* 




»M| 


*""*""" 




ii. 




^ 


^B 


M»- 


k 





Phillips Exeter Academy. 

esteemed as he attends to the business for which 
academies and colleges are founded. One of the 
school's accomplished instructors said to me once 
that nothing was more pathetic than to watch 
the first three months of a boy who comes to 
Exeter supposing that he is going to fool away 



88 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

his father's nionoy and his own time in a series 
of sports, where the studies are only exceptions. 
You might make a Greek tragedy, ahnost, out of 
the struggle of such a boy with his old self when 
he finds that work, and hard work, is the busi- 
ness of the place. 

The Revolutionary histor}" of New Hampshire 
would make an excellent book if one of the new 
school of historians would take it up and would 
illustrate it. I like to spend a month every 
summer in Conway. Well, why is Conway called 
Conway ? Because General Henry Seymour Con- 
way stood up for the colonists so well in the dis- 
cussions of the English Parliament and the Stamp 
Act. The town of Boston asked Conway for his 
portrait for Faneuil Hall, and he sent it to them ; 
and General Howe stole it when he went away, 
and no man knows where the real portrait is 
to-day. But a better monimient for Conway is 
in the lovely summer home of the people who 
breathe God's air there. 

John Stark, the New Hampshire general, at 
the rail fence at Bunker Hill, must have seen, 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 89 

eye to eye, William Howe, the English general 
who attacked him and was repelled there. The 
Stark regiment covered the retreat on that day 
which men thought so fatal to the American 
army. When Howe addressed his men before 




Field-Marshal Conway. 
From an engraving of 1798. 



attacking the American works, he said he would 
ask them to go no farther than he went himself ; 
and in fact he marched on foot with the regi- 



90 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

merit by the side of its colonel. They attacked 
Stark and the New Hampshire regiment who 
were, as we New Englanders say, ''behind the 
rail fence." The New Hampshire firing was so 
severe that the English regiment gave way, and it 
proved when the day was over that every officer 
of the Forty-second was killed or wounded. 
Howe alone Ijore a charmed 'life. And one of the 
letters of the time says that his white silk stock- 
ings were bloody from the blood on the grass as 
he retreated with the rest. 

Stark afterward thought that the Continental 
Congress had slighted him, so when he cut off 
Baum and his party at Bennington, he made the 
report of his victory to the state of New Hamp- 
shire and to the General Court of Massachusetts 
but not to the Congress at Philadelphia. We 
preserve in the Massachusetts State House the 
''one Hessian gun and bayonet, one broad- 
sword, one brass-barrelled drum," which Stark 
sent us after that day. It is rather inter- 
esting to know how people did such things 
then; so I will put on record the resolution 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 91 

in which the ^' Board of War" was instructed 
'^to present to the Honourable Brigadier-gen- 
eral Stark a complete suit of clothes becoming 
his rank, together with a piece of linen as 




John 8tark. 

testimony of the high sense this Court have of 
the great and important services rendered by 
that officer." 
Did any one think to send Admiral Dewey a 



92 TAIUIY AT HOME TRAVELS 

new uniform on the 1st of May, 1898? My 
own little tril)ute to Stark is in the marching 
song of Stark's men as he took them down to 
Bennington, or, as he called it, Wollomsac. If 
we can trust Colonel Creasy, the history of Ben- 
nington and what followed belongs in the history 
of the fifteen great battleg of the world. 

THE MARCHING SONG OF STARK's MEN^ 

March ! March ! March ! from sunrise till it's dark, 

And let no man straggle on the way ! 
March ! March ! March ! as we follow old John Stark, 

For the old man needs us all to-day. 

Load ! Load ! Load ! Three buckshot and a ball, 

With a hynm-tune for a wad to make them stay ! 
But let no man dare to fire till he gives the word to all 

Let no man let the buckshot go astray. 

Fire ! Fire ! Fire ! Fire all along the line, 

When we meet them ]:)loody Hessians in array ! 

They shall have every grain from this powder-horn of 
mine, 
Unless the cowards turn and run away ! 

1 My ac'complislicd friend, Mr. Wliclplcy, has set this march- 
ing song to music for the benefit of the New Hampshire school- 
boys. If j'ou are reading the Bible, you do not say "marching 
song," but a "song of degrees." 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 93 

Home ! Home ! Home ! When the fight is fought and 
won, 
To the home where the women watch and pray ! 
To tell them how John Stark finished what he had be- 
gun, 
And to hear them thank our God for the day. 
August 16, 1777. 

These latter years are years of mourning for 
us who love New Hampshire, because this new 
business of paper pulp is stripping off her mag- 
nificent forests. 

In old times, as I have said, King George sent 
his surveyors round, and when they saw a tree 
fit for his navy, they marked it with the broad 
arrow of the navy, so when its time came it was 
cut down in the winter, was hauled on the snow 
to the largest stream within range, and floated 
down to the ocean. I think it could be shown 
that in all the great sea fights in which the 
English, French, Spanish, or American navies 
were engaged between 1776 and 1790, the spars 
of all the vessels were from the New Hampshire 
forests. So other ship-builders cut logs and 
floated them down if they were big enough for 



94 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

spars or wide enough for boards. But the 
smaller trees were left, 

" Not for the good they may do now. 
But will do when they're grown up." 

So that the mountains were still green, and so 
the forests still grew into cathedral aisles. And 
with every summer the wilderness was alive with 
glories for which there is no comparison. 

Then, alas ! Satan came walking up and down. 
And he devised methods of making paper from 
wood pulp. Before him, when angels and arch- 
angels presided over that business, paper was 
made of such rags as busy housewives minded 
to see the end of, and haply of older paper 
which had served its turn. 

But now, alas ! there is not a tree in the forest, 
big or little, old or young, from which you can- 
not make paper. 

What follows is that you enter your forest with 
your axes in summer as you once did in winter, 
and you cut down virtually everything. If you 
leave a few sumach bushes or blackberry vines, it 



NEW HAMPSHIRE 95 

is because they are not worth the handhng, they 
are so small. Big pines, little pines, big spruces, 
little spruces, big hemlock, little hemlock, — all 
fall before the axe. All is grist for Satan's mill. 
For which the remedy will come — so soon as 
the Congress of America makes a National Park 
of the White Mountain summits. The state has 
surveyed the region carefully, and a fit plan has 
been prepared. Uncle Sam must acquire fifty 
square miles, be the same more or less, and put 
it in charge of his foresters. And then my 
children's children's children shall see the great- 
grandchildren of the pines that I saw sixty years 
ago, in place of the sumach and other rubbish 
that the pulp creatures have left us to-day. 
We ought to have done this years ago, but it is 
not too late for the twenty-first century. 



CHAPTER IV 
VERMONT 

Vermont is a region of wonderful picturesque 
beauty. The fields are very fertile, and it has 
proved to have great agricultural resources. 
For myself, I have never seen fields of clover 
which compared with the rich clover fields of 
Vermont when clover is in l)lossom. I suppose 
there are such fields elsewhere, but I never saw 
them. All the same, the first English settlement 
of Vermont was as late as the year 1724, when 
Fort Dummcr, in the southern part of the state, 
was established by the province of Massachusetts. 
But, as has been said, no considerable number of 
settlers went in until the Peace of 1762 made 
that frontier of New England secure against 
foreign invasion. It was a frontier state, and, 
as I said in speaking of Maine just now, it was a 
field of war, not of peace. 

96 




97 



VERMONT 99 

For some reason or other there were no native 
residents there at the time when our first white 
colonists landed, so men say. It seems to have 
been, I think, by a sort of common consent on 
the part of the Indians who Uved in New Hamp- 
shire, Massachusetts, and New York, that when, 
in hunting, the Indians met each other there 
they did not cut each other's throats. I am apt 
to think, however, also, that if a party of Iroquois 
crossed from central New York into that region, 
they would have fought against the Indians of 
New England, who were their standing enemies. 
Remember that the Iroquois vocabulary was 
absolutely different from that of the New Eng- 
land tribes, and all their methods of social life 
and their warfare differed. Has any one ever 
heard of a New England Indian burning a prisoner 
to death, as the Iroquois undoubtedly often did ? 

Anyway, what is sure is that there was no 
resident population of Indians in what we call 
Vermont, though in summer they went down to 
Lake Champlain, having fished and hunted deer 
up and down through the valleys. 

L. Uh u. 



100 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



AVhile the New Hampshire mountains rest 
mostly on granite, the mountain range of the 
Green Mountains which runs through Vermont 
rests on slates and shales which are often tipped 
up almost perpendicularly. 

So it happens that the mountains of Vermont 
are more picturesque, on 
the whole, than are the 
New Hampshire moun- 
tains. That sort of pud- 
dingy aspect which people 
criticise in our dear 
Mount Washington hardly 
appears in the Green 
Mountains. For the same, 
reason the river gorges are 
more like the canons of the West than any other 
valleys in New England. The story is a familiar 
one of the country doctor who, pressing his horse 
home at midnight over a bridge which he had 
crossed by daylight, found the horse very unwil- 
ling to go. It proved next day that he had 
pressed the horse along a stringpiece of the 




General Wolfe. 




101 



VERMONT 103 

bridge, from which the boards had been washed 
away since he passed early in the day. This 
story is told, perfectly authenticated, I should 
say, of one of the streams which flows into Lake 
Champlain. It is told just as well authenticated 
in Berkshire County in Massachusetts. And a 
correspondent tells me that the same story is 
told of the Ausable River in New York. The 
reader may judge whether the same thing hap- 
pened three times. What I know is that it 
might have happened at any of these gorges. 
The walls of the torrent in all cases are a sort of 
slaty shale which rises perpendicular from the 
water. 

The civilized history of Vermont begins only 
when the incursions of Indians and Jesuits 
ceased with Wolfe's victory at Quebec. Then be- 
gan an enthusiasm for settlement of those beauti- 
ful valleys. There are still extant the records of 
the parties which were sent from one or another 
town of Connecticut, Massachusetts, or New 
Hampshire, and some of their marching songs. 
Thus there grew up the sturdy set of Green Moun- 



104 



TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 



tain boys who give such picturesqueness to the 
history of that whole region. In 1777 the Enghsh 

governors of Canada 
hoped that they should 
seduce these people from 
allegiance to the Conti- 
nental Congress, which 
had never done anything 
for them. An officer of 
rank was imprudent 
enough to try to seduce 
Ethan Allen when Alk^n 
was a prisoner in New 
York. He told Allen that 
he should be the colonel 
of a regiment, should be 
presented to the king, and 
should have ''a large 
tract of land either in the 
ETHAN ALLEN. ^^^ Hampshirc Grants 

" In the Name of the (ireat Jeho- 
vah and the Contuieutal Con- qy [h ConUC C ti C U t." 
gress ! " 

Ethan Allen replied : * ' I 
told him that if by faithfulness 1 had reconi- 




i-f 



VERMONT 105 

mended myself to General Howe, I should be 
loath by unfaithfulness to lose the governor's 
good opinion. Besides that, I viewed the offer 
of land to be similar to that which the devil 
offered Jesus Christ, ' to give him all the king- 
doms of the world if he would fall down and 
worship him,' when at the same time the damned 
soul had not a foot of land on earth." 

From that day to this day Vermont has earned 
the name, among people who know anything 
about it, of a model democracy. I wish that 
one of the intelligent Swiss writers on govern- 
ment would come over here to see how they do 
things in Vermont. You see, there are no very 
large cities. Burlington, the largest of them all, 
is a model city for the world to take note of and 
keep in memory. 

I like to put in here a description of Burlington 
which I made in a speech before Alpha Delta Phi at 
its annual convention in New York in 1888. I had 
had, not long before, a friendly passage with Mat- 
thew Arnold, who had said rather carelessly that 
there was nothing ''distinguished" in America. 



lOG 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



"When I heard in conversation this criticism, 
which I had never seen in print, about the absence 
of anything ^distinguished' in our cities, I asked 
myself what was the last American city I had 
visited in my winter travels. As it happened, it 
was one of the smallest of American cities — 




View of Burlington, Vermont. 
From an old copperplate engraving. 

the city of Burlington, in the state of Vermont. 
I may be told that there was nothing distinguished 
there. Perhaps not; but I know that, as we 
entered the town, as I looked back on the Green 
Mountains, which had been white with snow 
all day, but were now rosy red in the glory of 



VERMONT 107 

the setting sun, I thought it was one of the 
noblest visions I had ever looked upon. I 
turned to look upon the clouds of sunset — to 
see, far away, the sun as he went down between 
the broken range of the Adirondack Mountains. 
Between was the white ice of Lake Champlain. 
So far as Nature has anything to offer to the 
eye, I had certainly never seen in the travels 
of forty years any position chosen for a city more 
likely to impress a traveller as remarkable, and 
to live always in his memory. I had been 
summoned to Burlington on an errand con- 
nected with the public administration of charity. 
It was supposed that, as I came from Boston, I 
knew how cities ought to be governed. Any- 
way, I was up there as an expert. Now, what 
was the chief thing I found? Those of you who 
have ever been in Burlington will know that I 
was in a city of palaces. I mean by that, that 
there are private homes there, which, while they 
have the comforts of a log cabin, display the 
elegances of a palace. But I shall be told that 
this is not distinguished now — that this may 



108 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

be seen everywhere in a country as rich as 
America. Let it be so. Then they took me to 
visit a new hospital, arranged with everything 
which modern science knows for the treatment 
of disease, with a staff of surgeons and physi- 
cians who might stand unawed before the great 
leaders in their profession; and they told me 
that here any person in Vermont who was in 
need could be treated by the best science of the 
nineteenth century, and with the tenderest care 
which the Christian religion inspires. They told 
me that this institution was maintained by a 
fund of nearly half a million dollars, given by 
one lady, for this purpose of blessing her brothers 
and sisters of mankind. If this be a common- 
place monument, let us thank God that we live 
in a commonplace land. They took me then to 
the public library. They showed me the 
Canadian immigrants from the other side of the 
border thronging the passages that each might 
have his French book to read, the German immi- 
grant pressing for his book; they showed a per- 
fect administration for the supply of these needs. 



VERMONT 109 

And they showed me that they had not only 
provided for the rank and file in this way — 
providing, observe, thousands of books in Ger- 
man and thousands of books in French — but 
they showed the 'last sweet thing' in the criti- 
cism of Dante, the last publications of the 
archaeological societies of Italy, — books and 
prints which had been issued, well, let us say 
it among ourselves, for as dainty people as you 
and I are, for the elegant students of Browning 
or of mediaeval times. They had taken as good 
care of us in our daintiness as they had taken 
of the Canadian wood-chopper or of the German 
mechanic. This seemed to me rather a dis- 
tinguished bit of administration. And so I 
might go on to tell j^ou about other arrange- 
ments for charities, of their forelook in regard 
to sanitary arrangements. And when I asked 
them on the particular matter where I was sent 
for to give counsel — how many people they 
had in their Blackwell's Island establishments, 
in their public institutions for the poor — I 
found there was a momentary question whether 



110 TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 

there were three of these people at that moment 
in these pubhc institutions, or possibly four ! 

"That is so distinguished a condition of affairs 
that I should not dare tell the story in any social 
science congress in Europe. It would be set 
down as a Yankee exaggeration. People would 
say it was impossible. It is not .impossible, 
because the men and women of Burlington have 
known how to give themselves to the administra- 
tion of 'the wealth in common.' Among other 
things, I may say, in passing, that they have 
known how to suppress the open bar." 

To the reader at a distance, who knows nothing 
of New England life, it will be as well to say 
that such homage as I am thus paying to Ver- 
mont is a homage to Local Government. What 
in Vermont we call republican democracy, or 
democratic republicanism, results in such a 
picture as I have here printed of Burlington. It 
is what Kropotkin and his friends would call 
"anarchy," by which they mean strongly ac- 
cented local government with no central power. 
Given a region of intelligent men, and men who 



VERMONT 111 

love God and wish to serve him, a region where 
most people live where they have lived since 
childhood, a region where everybody can read 
and write; and let the people of such a region 
take care of themselves, of their own schools, 
their own roads, their own poorhouses, without 
the interference of any central authority, and 
you come out on the state of Vermont, or some- 
thing like it. 

I happened to be the witness of a very pretty 
httle incident in which some of 'Hhem furreners" 
learned what it is so hard for them to learn, 
that while you live in a democracy you may be 
subject to Law, and that this Law has a very 
large L. It seems that for some sorts of charcoal 
you need some sorts of wood. For instance, if 
you are going to make an annealed watch spring, 
you do not use the same charcoal as if you were 
making steel rails at ninety-nine pounds a yard. 
So one of the great charcoal burners of the world 
had bought a few thousand acres, more or less, 
of woodland in Vermont to meet the wishes of 
some particular customers. To cut down the 



112 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



wood and burn it a commander of Dagoes had 
brought up a Uttle regiment of Dagoes, and they 
went to work. After they had been at work a 
year or more, there appeared the tax collector 
of the town with his bills for the poll-tax of every 
Dago among them. Now the paying of taxes was 

just one of the 
things which 
the Dago had 
meant to avoid 
by leaving 
the beneficent 
reign of King 
Victor Emman- 
uel, or whoever 
it was. So they 
said when the 

Samuel de fnAMPLViN. taX bills CamC 

in that they would be hanged if they would pay 
them. I am not sure but that they used ex- 
pressions more theological. To them the tax 
collector merely replied, very much to their sur- 
prise, that if they did not pay them, the whole 



r'^ ^ ^^. 


'^B^^^^H 


li^K ^^H 


.j^i^H^^^HI 




H 


^^H 


^ 



VERMONT 113 

army of Vermont would appear if necessary on 
the scene, and they would all be sent to prison. 

I tell this story because it was a perfect eye- 
opener to these Dagoes. The man who moved 
them to and fro, as you move chessmen on a 
board, said that he would do whatever the 
Consul General of Italy in the city of New York 
said he must do. Observe, and this is the in- 
teresting point with me, the way in which the 
Celt steadily holds to his disposition to be gov- 
erned by a Boss. Somebody went down to New 
York ; the Consul General was no fool, and he told 
them they must pay their poll-taxes and they 
paid them. They got their first lesson as to the 
strength of a Democratic Republic. 

In old days the annual session of the legisla- 
ture ranged from three days to ten. But I am 
told now the legislature meets only on alternate 
years. It meets in the early part of September 
and usually sits till the last of November. I had 
the pleasure of meeting one of Vermont's gov- 
ernors once for a few days at a hotel in western 
North Carolina. Every morning at breakfast he 



114 TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 

brought in the business of the state of Vermont 
in an envelope in which he had received it from 
the secretary of state, and the heutenant- 
governor. The whole of it could be transmitted 
for four cents' worth of postage. This governor, 
if the Philistines want to know, had a salary of a 
thousand dollars a year, and if it were necessary 
for his wife's health or fo^ his own studies that 
he should spend a month in western North 
Carolina, why, he could do so, leaving details 
to the lieutenant-governor. What this gentle- 
man needed to consult the governor about could 
be transacted, as I saw, through the Post Office. 
Happy is that people whose history is not written ! 
Happy is that people whose legislative sessions 
are few and short ! Happy is that state which 
always votes the Republican ticket ! They in- 
vented a new motto for their state some fifty 
years ago, ''The star which never sets." This 
means that from the beginning they never gave 
in to the Southern Oligarchy in any matter of 
form or of principle. 
There are many, many ways to see Vermont. 




115 



VERMONT 117 

There are many, many pleasant places to visit 
in Vermont. Go, if you please, to Atherton, 
an imaginary town which I invented for my 
unread novel, ''Sybil Knox." For myself, I 
.never enjoyed life more than I did when, in 1864, 
I started with my haversack from the mouth of 
the Ashuelot River and walked across to Burling- 
-ton and Lake Champlain. I could make a book 
about my memories of that walk, of the persons 
who joined me, of the scenery, and of the glorious 
prosperity of the free people. 

The earliest history of Vermont carries us 
back to the very beginning of the seventeenth 
century. 

When Champlain was doing his best to get 
through to the Pacific Ocean, he discovered the 
lake which bears his name. Somewhere at the 
southern end of that lake he and the Indians 
who escorted him had a skirmish with some 
other Indians who were perhaps Iroquois. It is 
not possible to place the incident of these early 
adventures of his. 

The state as we found of New Hampshire has a 



118 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



Revolutionary history which is well worth follow- 
ing; of those who are remembered, and as the 

Book of Ecclesias- 
ticus says, of those 
others who were 
not remembered. 

Let me tell the 
story of one Ver- 
mont battle-field, 
because it brings 
in the pathetic 
story of one of my 
own kinsmen, and 
these chapters are 
^ r, o ^ chapters not only 

Brigadier-General Simon Fraser, '■ ^ 

Lieutenant-Colonel of the 24th q£ placCS but of 
Foot. ^ ' 

1^29-1777. persons. This is 

(General Fraser commanded tlie British , i + . r f +1 

forces at the battle of Hubbardton.) ^''^^ SlOry 01 tUe 

Nathan Hale who 
was taken prisoner by Burgoyne's land forces at 
Hubbardton. 

The Massachusetts contingent had been hurried 
up to meet Burgoyne. Jolm Stark, who was a 




VERMONT 119 

sort of Agamemnon sulking in his tent, was bring- 
ing up the New Hampshire mihtia, and he even- 
tually commanded at Bennington. But the force 
which practically met Burgoyne was a force of 
militia who were entirely outnumbered. They 
knew as much of military tactics as the reader of 
these words knows, perhaps a little more. But 
they knew how to fight, and they knew how to die. 
The Earl of Balcarras and Burgoyne, in their 
testimony before the House of Lords, spoke with 
admiration of the gallant behavior of these men 
at Hubbardton. They were entirely outnumbered 
in that fight, but they did not retire till an action 
so severe that the English lost one hundred and 
fifty men. There is not a bit of Revolutionary 
reading more interesting than Burgoyne 's state- 
ment as to the spirit with which these men en- 
gaged. In his testimony before the House of Lords 
he makes occasion to say that any critic who 
thought that his antagonists were a horde of inex- 
perienced peasants were greatly mistaken. He begs 
that it may be understood that he acted against 
soldiers who showed great spirit and courage. 



120 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



In 1777 the king's government in England 
was fully satisfied that Burgoyne's expedition 
was to cut the rebel forces in two by his march 
from Montr(>al to New York ; to leave New Eng- 
land out in the cold, and so to end the rebelhon. 




Ruins of Fokt Ticonderoga. 

Burgoyne had everything given to him which he 
wanted. Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, 
had very nearly cleared Canada of the Rebel 
invasion in 1776, and Burgoyne advanced south- 
ward in a short triumph over Lake Champlain. 



VERMONT 121 

Hessians and English arrived at Ticonderoga at 
the southern end of the lake with no formidable 
naval opposition. It is then that the colors of 
England and Brunswick and Hesse 

" In triumph vain 
Gay flaunted over blue Champlain." 

Millions had been spent on Fort Ticonderoga 
in one or another generation. To this hour the 
''ruins" are more like the ruins we read about 
than anything else which can be seen in the 
northern states of America. It was considered a 
great point of success when in 1775 Ethan Allen 
had surprised Ticonderoga and taken it for the 
colonies in the name of ''Jehovah and the Con- 
tinental Congress." When Burgoyne advanced, 
this fort was held by St. Clair for the Americans. 
It was a great disappointment to everybody 
when Burgoyne, by what seems to have been a 
surprise to St. Clair, planted his guns on Mount 
Defiance, which had been supposed inaccessible, 
and without firing a shot compelled St. Clair's 
garrison to retire. He could not ask for a more 
auspicious beginning of his invasion. 



122 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

There is something very fine, I say, — it is what 
we call soldier-like, — in his narrative in the 
credit he gives to the spirit and discipline of 
the retreating force as it retired southward 
from Ticonderoga. A hundred and thirty years 
later it is worth while to contrast it with the 
unfair impression given at the time in New Eng- 
land. Because the Americans retreated, it was, 
perhaps, the habit of our people to say they ran 
away. 

In fact, at the battle of Hubbardton, with 
two thousand men they engaged, according to 
Burgoyne's account, the advanced guard of 
the whole English army. Burgoyne says that 
they left dead on the field Colonel Francis and 
many other officers, with upwards of two hundred 
men, — that they lost six hundred in wounded. 
They lost also one colonel, seven captains, and 
two hundred and twenty other prisoners. It 
seems to me really pathetic that as well-fought a 
battle as this should appear in the popular notion 
of that time as a disgraceful retreat. 

Nathan Hale, the colonel of one of the regi- 




123 



VERMONT 125 

ments, was taken prisoner. Burgoyne paroled 
him for two years which expired in 1779, when 
he loyally went to New York and surrendered 
himself on his parole. He died at New Utrecht, 
Long Island, just thirty-seven years old, three 
years after his cousin Nathan Hale, a Connecti- 
cut cousin, who was hanged in disgrace by Gen- 
eral Howe, whose people had arrested him a few 
days before. This Captain Nathan Hale was 
hanged at the corner of the little park near 
Broadway. The disgrace of his being hanged 
rested • on the whole Connecticut household 
from which he came. The method of his death 
was what they grieved for. My own father, 
who bore his uncle's name, was forbidden to 
speak of him to his father, because the whole 
was so painful. His one request when he was 
told that he must die was that he might be 
shot and not hanged. But now one of these 
Nathan Hales is remembered. There is a statue 
to him on Broadway. I stop to read the inscrip- 
tion every time I pass there: "I am sorry that 
I have but one life to give to my country;" 



126 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

and I have never stopped there but some news- 
boy was at my side reading the same inscription. 
And the other of those Nathan Hales was never, 
I think, heard of by the reiider of these hnes till 
he reads them now. 80 far as fame goes, one 
of the two was taken and the other left, and the 
one who was taken was the one who thought he 
might be disgraced by the manner of his death. 
The dates are these : — 

General St. Clair abandoned Ticonderoga, 6th of July, 
1777. 

Battle of Hubbardton, 7th of July, 1777. 
Battle of Bennington, August 16, 1777. 
Battle of Saratoga, 19th of September, 1777. 
Surrender at Saratoga, 17th of October, 1777. 

In writing about New Hampshire I spoke of the 
battle of Bennington as belonging with Burgoyne's 
defeat at Saratoga. Colonel Creasy spoke of that 
as one of the fifteen decisive battles of the world. 
Bennington was in what was called the Hamp- 
shire Grants, which so soon declared their own 
independence and made Vermont a state which 
joined the old Thirteen when she chose. 



VERMONT 127 

Senator Hoar used to tell a fine story of his 
first visit to Bennington. He made some mistake 
in leaving his hotel to go to see the monument 
on the battle-ground. But he fell in with a 




Alexander Macomb, Major-General U. S. A. 
From an engraving by J. B. Longacre of the painting by T. Sully. 

little boy who became his guide. Hoar asked 
him some questions about the battle, and the 
boy was somewhat confused in his answers. 
He acknowledged that he was not perfectly 



128 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

informed, saying, ^'What I know is that the Ben- 
ningtons beat." The actual battle-ground was 
on the New York side of the state line. 

There is another feather in the cap of Vermont, 
which her own people prize perhaps, but outside 
her own borders it is not referred to so often as 
is that battle where the ' ' Benningtons beat." 
This feather was won the day of the double bat- 
tle of Plattsburg, in 1814, when General Macomb 
with his little army drove back Sir George Prevost 
with the English army, and when McDonough, 
only thirty years old, with the American fleet, 
sank or drove back the English fleet. That 
was one of the battles of ship-builders, as some- 
body calls them — Henry Adams, I think — when 
the question was, which nation could get a ship 
to sea before the other. McDonough's fleet went 
out almost as Lucas's went out from Carthage, 
with the green leaves growing on the end of 
their spars. Macomb's army was made up of 
such soldiers as he found. He had fifteen hun- 
dred ''effectives," by which he means soldiers 
enlisted by the United States. McDonough did 



VERMONT 



129 



sink the great part of the Enghsh fleet, and drove 
the rest northward. On shore the Enghsh troops, 
before they made their main attack, heard the 
cheering of their American enemy on account of 




Captain Thomas McDonough. 
From au engraving by J. B. Forrest after a painting by J. W. Jarvis. 

the defeat of the fleet, and so retreated — a re- 
treat which went as far as Canada. Of course 
the repulse was appreciated at the time, when, 
indeed, it was greatly needed in America, for 



130 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the capture of the city of Washington by Ross's 
army had taken place about a fortnight before. 
The effect of this repulse in England was practi- 
cally that it ended the war. 

The Ministry asked the Duke of Wellington 
to come over to America and to take the com- 
mand. His answer is a very interesting letter, 
showing that he understood the condition more 
completely than some of those people who called 
themselves ''the Government." 

''Had any considerations of personal glory 
. . . induced me to pursue those offensive opera- 
tions by land, independently of the fleet, which 
it would appear were expected of me," the re- 
sults would have been disastrous, he says. Such 
operations have been attempted before on the 
same ground. And twenty-five years later he 
said that he "thought he sent them some of his 
best troops from Bordeaux, l)ut they did not 
turn out quite right. They wanted this iron 
fist to command them." Condensing his various 
despatches declining to come over here and as- 
sume the command, it appears that we should 



VERMONT 131 

consider that the critical battle of the whole con- 
cern was that in which McDonough and Macomb 
took command at Plattsburg. Observe the Mac 
in the name of the two commanders; and young 
men may as well observe that the sailor was 
thirty years old and the general was thirty-two 
years old. This reminds us of the young men of 
the Revolution. 

Students and people who care for history, and 
people who care for the English language, and 
people who are glad that the United States is 
a nation, will not forget that George Perkins 
Marsh was a Vermonter, a man who rendered 
very great service to us all. He was very kind 
to me when I was a mere boy, and honored me 
by his correspondence till he died. And there 
is no better illustration than the statement of 
his career of the healthy and hearty results 
when you trust a nation to the insight and 
foresight of Democracy. In the old days of 
Southern supremacy, Vermont voted alone every 
year for the rule of free men in the nation, 
without what the politicians would call ''reward." 



132 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

She was the ''star that never sets." But when 
General Taylor camc^ in, and for a few years the 




Oeorck Perkins Marsh. 
From the portrait by Healcy painted in 1H15. 

men of business at the North ruled the land in 
phice of the politicians of the South, it was 
thought at Washington that Vermont should be 



VERMONT 133 

''rewarded," and they asked her representative, 
George Perkins Marsh, if he would accept a 
foreign mission. 

Now, it happened that Marsh had been all 
his life studying the languages, the scenes, and 
the legends of northern Europe, and his friends 
intimated that it would be agreeable to him to 
represent this country at Copenhagen. Recol- 
lect that all this about Vinland and Thorfinn 
and Thorvald and the rest had just come to 
light. But the new government could not send 
him to Copenhagen, but said that they would 
send him to Constantinople. Scandinavian or 
Semitic — what difference did that make as the 
dice-box of patronage threw out its six or its five ! 
And indeed that happened, if anything happens, 
that this master of Northern literature took in 
as a matter of course the Oriental questions and 
added the treasures of the East to the stock 
which seemed ample before. His philological 
learning gave him preeminence in the great 
diplomatic circle of Constantinople. 

He afterwards travelled in the north of 



134 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Europe; he spent many years in Italy, to the 
great advantage of us all, and in philological mat- 
ters which relate to our own language he is one 



> 



«^ 




Mrs. (;i:oi;(;i. I'kkkins Maksh. 

of the great leaders. But 1 do not like to speak 
of him without speaking of his charming wife, who 
made additions not to be forgotten to the litera- 
ture of the century. 



VERMONT 135 

I think that the young men and young women 
of Vermont who want a college training are apt 
to go to their own colleges, Burlington and 
Middlebury, and that they are wise in doing so. 
I dare not go into the successes of Vermont's 
sons and daughters in literature. Everybody 
remembers, not to speak of persons now living 
in this country whose names and work we read 
every day, Saxe, and the Stevenses, Henry and 
Benjamin Franklin, to whom we owe inestimable 
contributions to American history. Vermont 
adopted Mr. Kipling, though he has run away 
from us for the moment. 

Take care, while you are in Vermont, to see the 
great Proctor marble quarries. There is a town of 
Proctor, where some of them are. But I do not 
know how far their marvellous enterprise ex- 
tends. I do know that Richard Greenough told 
me that the statuary marble of Vermont was 
equal to any in the world. And I think one or 
two of his best works preserve the memory of 
— what shall I say ? — the blush or the sunset 
hue which just redeems the pure white from chill. 



136 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



Senator Proctor's service to the country when 
the Cuban war began will never be forgotten. 

And if you visit him this summer, let him 
know that you remember that Vermont gave 
the Morgan horse to the country. For the 
senator has highly determined that that race 
of horses shall not die out from the land. 




"--"'-'r^ """"""■''■'■" 0.>.Ma»d l>oV.l' ,^. 








'-,^ 






taiiHiumiUiiUiuw.MiHrMHiKM 



;^g?*»?^yeyt^t%^i^^y<**' ■ ; ; 



The Statk House. 

"What Dr. Holmes aiulafiously callod the ' liiib of the Universe.' " 

188 



CHAPTER V 
MASSACHUSETTS 

A YEAR or two before Champlain was discover- 
ing Bar Harbor and Lake Champlain, the Earl 
of Southampton, whom the 
reader and I ought to love, 
sent a Captain named Gosnold 
to discover our dear New Eng- 
land. For the young noblemen 
of Queen Elizabeth's time were 
an enterprising and adventu- 
rous set. They meant to beat 
the devil by checkmating 
Spain, and they thought a good 
way to checkmate Spain and 
the devil would be to plant 
Protestant colonies in North America. So the 
Earl of Southampton sent out Gosnold in a ship 
of happy omen, for she was called the Concord. 

139 




Pine-tree Shilling. 



140 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



And Gosnold cainc up and saw our dear old 
Boston. And he sailed round Cape Cod, which 
people once called Cape Gosnold, in memoiy of 

him. And he 
discovered the 
Elizabeth Isl- 
ands, at the 
mouth of Buz- 
zards Ba}', 
where the dear 
old Common- 
wealth of Mas- 
sachusetts is 
establishing a 
leper hospital 
to-day. Put 
that on record 
because it is our 
way of acting on 
the Sermon on 
the Mount, and showing that we build upon a 
rock. And on the Island of Cuttyhunk, the 
most southerly of the Elizabeth Islands, Gosnold 




Hr.NKY WUIOTUKSLKV, TlIlKl) EARL OF 

Southampton. 



MASSACHUSETTS 141 

and his men established the first colony on the 
North Atlantic shore of the United States. 
Raleigh had tried before him, on Roanoke 
Island, where Virginia Dare was born. 

I think Gosnold's colony lasted seven weeks. 
The ruins of the storehouse are there to this day, 
with the monument which tells the tale. If 
you want to read the history, take down the 
''Tempest" and read of Caliban and mussels in 
the brooks and sassafras logs and seamews and 
quarrels between sailors and gentlemen. That 
is exactly the story of what happened in Gos- 
nold's seven weeks. 

And at the end of the seven weeks, no one would 
stay there, and they all went back to London. 
And they hustled up to the Earl of Southamp- 
ton's palace and told their story of quarrel, of 
tempest, of seamews, and of logs. 

And according to me, one William Shake- 
speare, who was the friend and companion of 
the Earl of Southampton, used to sit in the great 
hall of the palace and hear these stories. And 
according to me he was writing the ''Tempest" 



:^2 TARllY AT HOME TRAVELS 

then and brought these stories in. So is it that 
the mise en scene of the ''Tempest" is not that of 
the West Indies or of Bermuda where there are 
no brooks, nor flying squirrels, nor mussels in 
the brook nor sassafras logs, but is a copy of 
Cutty hunk, as Gosnold and his sailors found it. 
So is it that Miranda, God bless her ! is a Mas- 
sachusetts girl. 

Probably no one in the world accepts this 
criticism on Shakespeare excepting me. But 
I do accept it, and this reader had better accept 
it, for it will be the received comment in the 
year 1950. 

It has been said already in these papers that 
if you w\ant to know anything, you had better 
go and see it yourself. That is their text. Per- 
sonal presence moves. the world, as my dear old 
friend Eli Thayer cither said or did not say. I 
have always referrcnl the remark to him because 
he lived up to its i)rin('i))lo. This is true, that 
you remember what you have seen as you do 
not remember so well what you hear, as I think 
Horace saj's before me. 




^^^Y^: ^^;^>t{::^U. 




143 



MASSACHUSETTS 145 

So it is that I shall find myself advising this 
gentle reader to see Massachusetts as I have seen 
it. It is as a spider living on the hub of his 
wheel adventures out upon this spoke, upon that, 
or upon another. Here am I, born on the slope 
of Beacon Hill, if you please; or as old writers 
would have said, ''as the roadway goes down 
from Sherburne's to the water." Now just above 
the place where I was born, not half a quarter 
of a mile away, is the State House of Massachu- 
setts with a gold pineapple upon the top. This 
is what Dr. Holmes audaciously called the ''hub 
of the Universe," and the Boston people to this 
hour chuckle because he said it, thinking in their 
own hearts, dear souls, that it is true. 

What is curious is that by great good fortune 
the Capitol of Massachusetts is so placed that 
within five miles of this pineapple is the statistical 
centre, census after census, of the population of 
the state. There are so many more people in 
those great manufacturing towns which have 
to keep in close touch with the seaboard that 
when the statistical people do their best to find 



146 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



a mathematical centre for all these hundreds 
of thousands, it proves that the State House has 
put itself within a few miles of that centre. 

For me, since in this chapter I am to talk more 
or less about myself, birth in Boston meant 
radiation in one direction or another. My 

father saw very soon 
that the great canal 
system of New York 
and the states to the 
south and westward 
could not be made to 
work in New England, 
though many people 
thought it could. He 




QuiNCV Railway rixcHEii. 
(See List of Illustrations.) 



' caught on 



to the 



railway system invented in England, and while 
people thought he was crazy, he foresaw lines 
of it in his own state. It must have been in 
182G that, as I sat, a little l)oy four years old, 
on a little yellow box provided for me in his 
''chaise," he took my mother out with hvv little 
bo}' sitting thus at their feet, and we came to 



MASSACHUSETTS 



147 



the line of the Quincy Railway, the first railway 
built in the United States. He gave her the 
reins; he alighted from the chaise; he struck 
the flat iron rail with his foot to see how closely 
it was spiked on 



the timber below; 
he returned into 
the chaise and ex- 
plained to me what 
the railway was. 
This is one of the 
first memories of 
my life. 

From that time 




The Stourbridge Lion, the First 
Locomotive in America (1829). 



nearly to his death problems of engineering occu- 
pied him as they referred to railroads or to water 
supply. When I write my successful novel, and 
The Outlook relieves its bank account by sending 
me a check for half a year's royalties, I am going 
to ask Macmonnies to make an equestrian statue 
of my father with his binocular in his hand. 
This statue is to be placed without other ped- 
estal on a rock which is half porphyry, in 



148 



TARRY AT HOxME TRAVELS 



Wellesley, Massachusetts. For this rock parts 
tho Boston and Worcester Raih-oad, which he 
built, from the great Cochituate water-pipes, which 
he laid there to give life to Boston. 

As the surveys for the railroad began, and as 
they went westward, I and my older brother 




The Veazie Railroad, Bangok, Maine (1830). 

Nathan, who explained all things in life to me, 
were apt to be out with the parties of engineers 
anywhere between Boston and Worcester. Among 
other things, those years meant for us and my 
two sisters that we used to color maps of eastern 
Massachusetts so that the townships might be 
clearly distinguished. 

In that household we were a unit; where one 



MASSACHUSETTS 149 

went all went, and so the year I was four years 
old we all went down to Cape Cod. A year or two 
afterwards, in a great open barouche, we all 
circumnavigated Cape Ann, Fullum driving with 
the assistance of myself and my brother. One 
of those hot summers we went on the canal-boat 
General Sullivan to Lowell, taking only a day 
for the journey, which now requires forty-five 
minutes. On that day I saw my first tadpole, 
and my mother put him into her thimble. Joy 
of joys, in just such a barouche, as soon as the 
school vacation came round, every year if possible, 
we were all taken to the family altar at West- 
hampton, where my father was l^orn, a journey 
of nearly three days, the route varying as he liked 
to trace one valley or another. So soon as rail- 
roads were built of course we went everywhere 
upon them. And so it is that when I read the 
other day that a man had been in every town- 
ship of Massachusetts, I wondered why even I had 
not been in every township of Massachusetts, not 
on a bicycle, as he went, but mostly in these ear- 
lier expeditions. 



150 TAKIIY AT HOME TRAVELS 

I first settled down in life in Worcester, which 
with good reason calls itself the heart of the 
Commonwealth. The seal of the city is a heart, 




because the people there are fond of this name. 
Now Worcester is another excellent radiating 
point. You can take your friend in 3'our buggy 



MASSACHUSETTS 151 

early in an afternoon, and you can cross waters 
which flow into the Merrimac on the north, into 
Narragansett Bay and the Thames River on the 




John Abams. 

south, into the Connecticut on the west, and return 
to your Worcester home before supper. 

The old township system of New England holds. 
Thei'e is great pride in almost every one of these 



152 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

little commonwealths, more than three hundred 
in number. They have great pride in their lo- 
cality. No one can do them more good than by 
nursing this pride and trying to make it eternal. 
Go to Westboro, and they will tell you that 
Eli Whitney was born here, who revolutionized 
the industries of America. Go to Northampton, 
where they will tell you that Jonathan Edwards 
preached there, and will or will not tell you that 
they turned him out. Just now twelve hundred 
young women make their home at Smith Col- 
lege there. Go to Springfield, and you will hear 
that Springfield is the place where our National 
Government revolutionized for the world the busi- 
ness of the manufacture of small arms. Go to 
Quincy, and, besides the railway referred to above, 
they will show you the birthplace of John Adams, 
who practically wrote the constitutions of al- 
most all the old Thirteen States. His home 
was called Braintree then. Go to Amesbury; 
it was Whittier's home. Go down the river to 
Byfield, and here was the first woollen manufac- 
tory in America. Go to Cambridge, and you 




153 



MASSACHUSETTS 155 

see the statue of the first printer. Go to 
WiUiamstown, and here was Mark Hopkins's 
slab throne, as Garfield described it, and here 
was a celebrated haycock. Go to Easton; they 
will tell you that their axes are in the hands of 
men blacker than any you ever saw, under the 
equator in Africa. Go to Nantucket, and they 
say that Burke was talking about them when he 
told the House of Commons whom he envied. 
Go to Sheffield, and they say Orville Dewey 
was born here. Go to Pittsfield, and they say 
Henry Dawes lived here. Go to Sturbridge, 
and they say here was the first mine wrought 
in the United States, which has been kept in 
operation until now. Go to Gloucester, and they 
say Massachusetts pays for all her breadstuffs 
with the fish she draws out of the sea. Plymouth, 
Concord, Lexington, Bunker Hill — Mr. Webster 
says the world knows the history by heart. Go 
to Worcester, and they will tell you where Senator 
Hoar lived. Go to Wrentham, Helen Keller 
lives there. Go to Natick, or Newton, and in 
each of those towns people will tell you that 



156 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

John Eliot first preached to the Indians there. 
Go to Marshfield, and it is where Daniel Web- 
ster lived and died. Go to Beverly, here was 




John Eliot PREAciriNG to the Indians. 

the first cotton manufacture in America. Go 
to Newbury port, John Lowell lived here, the 
great Emancipator. Go to Concord, and hear 
about Emerson and Hawthorne. And so on 



MASSACHUSETTS 157 

and so on, with hundreds of other places and 
men. 

I have just named Smith College with its 
twelve hundred pupils. Whoever is thoroughly 
interested in the education of women ought to 
visit Smith College in Northampton, to cross the 
river and to see Mount Holyoke College in Had- 
ley, of which the Campus, if one is to call it so, 
is really matchless. Take care also that you see 
Wellesley College, under Miss Hazard, at Wellesley. 

I have already named Williams College, which 
has done and is doing and will do so much for 
the highest education of young men. When 
Amherst College was born, now the better part of 
a century ago, I think there was supposed to 
be some antagonism in the rivalry between this 
new broom and the older college in Berkshire. 
But it is apparent long ago that the founders 
builded better than they knew, and that there 
is ample room for them both, even though Dart- 
mouth College is not so far away. The truth 
is that the country is beginning to find out 
that the higher education is in no sort what 



158 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



the French call it, secondary education. And 
happily the more and better we provide, the 
nunil)(>r of students who mean to profit by 
this advantage increases in a larger })i-oportion. 




Ralph Waldo Emkrson. 



But when you speak of colleges, I like to put 
in this little l)it of statistics. I was in a great 
central high school building of one of our manu- 



MASSACHUSETTS 159 

facturing towns a year or two ago, and I said to 
the superintendent of education there that when 
I was in college at Cambridge, Harvard College 
had no building which would compare with that. 
He told me that thirteen of the cities of Massa- 
chusetts had provided for their public school 
service buildings which would quite equal that 
in which we stood. There are eleven Normal 
Schools maintained by the state in different 
sections, several of which would once have ranked 
as colleges in any of the standards which are 
familiar to the country. 

Now let us recollect all along, this charming 
local pride. It is the best thing in Massachu- 
setts, and you want to find it wherever you can. 
Here are more good instances of it. In the begin- 
ning, the town of Paxton, up in the Worcester 
hills, held a town meeting in which they declared 
war against King George. And if, at this moment, 
the town of Reading chooses to say that the 
Widow Dorcas in her home shall have better 
water than the President has in the White House, 
and that her sitting-room shall be better lighted 



160 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

at Christmas than this room in which I write, 
why, the town of Reading lays the pipes and the 
town of Reading makes the electricity, and 
asks the permission or the help of nobody this 




L)e.sti;l( HON of Tea in Boston Harbor. 
" Boston Harbor a tea pot to-uight! Hurrah for GritSn's Wharf! " 

side of Our Father, with whom she works in 
such exigencies. 

When I went to school, the custom in teaching 
geography was to begin with the Arctic Regions 
of Arherica, and work slowly down with the vague 
hope that some day you would arrive at New 
Zealand as a sort of Z at the end of the world. 




Paul Revere. 

From the portrait by Gilbert Stuart. 

161 



MASSACHUSETTS 163 

But in practice, what with change of masters 
and of text-books, you were forever beginning 
with Greenland, reading about the sea seen by 
Mackenzie and the seas seen by Mr. Hearne, and 
probably never travelled far beyond the United 
States. For me I never studied at school any 
geography of Asia or of Africa, and I will say in 
a whisper that it has made no difference whether 
I ever did or did not. But we did advance in 
my boyhood so far as to be taught that Massa- 
chusetts was ''celebrated for its fisheries, and for 
the part she had in the Revolution." It was 
also stated that the climate was good, but that 
''in the spring easterly winds arise which are 
very disagreeable." These facts, and no others, 
I think, were impressed upon the youthful mind. 
It is interesting to me to remember that I never 
heard an east wind spoken of till, at the age 
of eleven, I had to learn this sentence, and I asked 
at home if this were true. So indifferent are 
little children to their surroundings. 

I was twenty-three years old before I ever 
saw a wheat-field. Of course I had never seen 



164 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

cotton-fields or rice-fields or sugar plantations. 
But in college I had made long tramps north, 
west, and east in studying the flora of Middlesex 
and Essex counties, and a healthy interest in 
botany, instilled by my dear mother when I was 
veiy young, had given a half-scientific interest 
to such expeditions. At the end of my freshman 
year I and my brother took a long expedition 
on foot to see for ourselves the locality of the 
curious Lancaster or Berlin made, a crystal, it 
would be called, which exists in Berlin and Lan- 
caster and nowhere else in the world. From 
that hour to this I have been telling my young 
friends that the true way to travel is to travel 
on foot. Next best to this is a horseback ride ; 
next to this is a journey on a canal. It is only 
far down in the scale that you come to carriages 
and stage-coaches, and to bicycles ; and automo- 
biles let us hope never. Wise Elizabeth says 
that we do not take an automobile because "our 
object is not to g(^t to this place or that place, but 
to see what happens as we go." 

I was very much laughed at among my near 




Christ Church, Salem Street. 
165 



MASSACHUSETTS 



167 



friends a generation ago for saying, in a little 
guide book which I wrote for New England trav- 
ellers, that the best way to go from Providence 
to Newport is by a voyage in a friend's yacht. 
I still hold to that instruction, though it may 




The Evacuation of Buston, Maklh 17, 1776. 
From au engraving by F. T. Stuart of the drawing by L. Hollis. 

give one a slightly exaggerated sense of the re- 
sources of the country. Thus, the first time I 
ever went along Cape Cod, my cosmopolitan friend, 
Mr. Freeman Cobb, took me with his four-in-hand 
barouche over the admirable highroads of Brew- 
ster. We were deprived by accident of the 



1()8 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

company of a very distinguished French traveller 
who was ' ' doing " America. And I have delighted 
myself ever since with imagining what his descrip- 
tion of Cape Cod would have been if he had gone 
with us on that day's outing. For I am afraid 
from that time to this time no four-in-hand has 
been driven over those sands, certainly none 
by a more accomplished or agreeable guide. 

Of course the gentle reader may begin where he 
likes. I should not be sorry if, hiring a cottage 
at Nahant or Marblehead Neck or on the Beverly 
Shore, quite early in June, he made William and 
Edward, if those were the names of his grooms- 
men, keep up the horses in good condition till 
Thanksgiving time, and from these centres if 
he and Madam and the older children made 
excursions, a week at a time, into the different 
regions of Massachusetts. But possibly the horses 
may be sick with some epizootic disease — pos- 
sibly William and Edward may have returned 
for the summer to visit Tipperary or Riigen, 
and wo may need the trolley, steamboat, or, 
best of all, our good feet. In that case, Boston 




169 



MASSACHUSETTS 171 

is still the best centre. It is an excellent water- 
ing-place. There is my own treatise on Pic- 
turesque Massachusetts, and my '' Historical 
Boston" and ''Harry and Lucy," which might 
lie on the table. And if it were only a trolley, 
there are trolley rides by which this reader may 
sweep what is well-nigh a circle of fifty miles' 
radius. For Massachusetts Bay, which takes in a 
segment of perhaps a quarter of this circle, we will 
rely on the Othniel or Jathniel or any other of 
the steam yachts of our friends, or, in a more 
democratic fashion, we will rely on the daily 
excursion steamer. For a last resort, at least we 
can invest five cents in a street-car, and go to 
the South Boston pubhc baths or to Governor's 
Island. 

You may cut out the list of towns already given, 
and go to each and all. But to try geographical 
order, what we really want to see, ranging from 
north to south, are, first, the towns north of the 
Merrimac to which we owe the name, now national, 
of the '^ Gerrymander." Under Governor Gerry's 
reign in 1811 this string of towns made the neck 



172 



TARKY AT HOME TRAVELS 



of the monster Gerrymander who has gobbled 
up so many majorities in all parts of many coun- 
tries between that time and this. I was pleased 
to see that the name of ''Gerrymander" has 
worked its way into English politics. 




Thk Gerrymander. 

(See List of Illiistriitious.) 



In the town of Newburyport, at the mouth of 
the river, the fighting frigates of the Revolution 
were built. Think of their names, — the Marino 
Faliero, the Protector, the Tyrannicide, the Oliver 




173 



MASSACHUSETTS 175 

Cromwell. We knew something of history then. 
And you must see the river. Take care to take 
the steamer at Haverhill some day and spend 
one of the pleasantest days of your life in sailing 
down the Merrimac to Newbury port. You will 
have an intelligent captain who will tell }'ou of 
everything from the eagles in the sky to the shad 
in the river: the first woollen manufactory, the 
first cotton manufactory, first caterpillar bridge, 
first Bill of Rights, origin of the Longfellows, — if 
anybody cares, of the Hales, certainly of the 
Lowells and the Parsonses and all the rest of the 
Essex Junto, if anybody cares for history. If you 
believe that the manufacture of cotton is the one 
great object for which God made the world, as the 
old Economists seemed to think, go to Lowell and 
Lawrence, and delight in the conversation of those 
very spirited and intelligent manufacturers. Or 
is it wars and inimors of wars ? Go to Lexington 
and Concord, or see at Salem where the first blood 
of the Revolution was drawn, or at Arlington, 
where a black man commanded a company of 
exempts to whom we owe our first victory. Or 



176 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Charlestown, where is the United States Na\n 
Yai'd with its enormous dry dock. Give a da] 
to Marblehead, where you can still find some ok 
salts who will talk to you of the Constitution 
or you might go down to the North End Par] 
in Boston and board her. 

Harvard College? You have heard, perhaps 
of that. Go and see it ; tell them, you read ii 
The Outlook that there was such a place, and yoi 
thought you would like to compare it with you 
own college at New Padua. You could not spen( 
a week more pleasantly than I spent one once oi 
the Great Brewster Island. The rest of the worL 
knew that Napoleon III was a prisoner of stat 
thirty-six hours before I did. But I do not see bu 
that I am as happy now as I was then for all that 

Do you want to see them build ironclads? G( 
to Fore River. Or will you shed tears over thi 
first winter in Plymouth? Shed them at th 
burying-place, which is very like what it was then 
Is it ropes and cordage? Take a trolley fron 
the burial-place and learn all about that, — o 
where I fired my first gun? Sandwich. 




•J \ 



*^. 



Jf 



w. 




177 



MASSACHUSETTS 



179 



Recollect now, if you please, that you have 
come into the Old Colony — three counties, Plym- 
outh, Bristol, and Barnstable. And in those 
counties, from the time when old John Robinson 
said, ''There is more light and more truth yet 




Departure ok the Pilgrim Fathers from Delft Haven. 
From the painting by Charles W. Cope. 

to come out of God's Holy Word," there has been 
more freedom in religion — let one say, rever- 
ently, more persons have enjoyed easy access 
from the child to our Father who is in heaven — 
than in any other region of the same population 
in this world into which His kingdom is to come. 



180 TARKY AT HOME TRAVELS 

In saying this, I hope the imaginary student 
whom I am leading will spend enough time on 
Cape Cod. The last time I visited its capital, 
Barnstal)le, I asked my wife if she had ever gone 
into a jail. It proved that she never had, and 
I took her into the jail of this county — what 
in New England we call the County House, 
because it is both jail and house of correction 
and the residence of the keeper. AVe had the 
pleasure of seeing the accomplished keeper and 
his friendly wife and the cells of the jail, but 
there were no prisoners there. I tried afterwards 
to make the clergyman of the place (he would 
be called bishop if ours were an effete civilization) 
describe the social influences which led to such 
a result. But he said the thing was a matter of 
course — there could be no interest in any such 
discussion. He said I had better write the book 
myself, which I have never had time to do. 

In our day you can take an excellent train to 
Provincetown, and you can stop and see the cran- 
berry plantations which have proved even more 
profitalole than the old deep-sea fisheries of the 



MASSACHUSETTS 



181 



Cape. You may hear traditions upon traditions 
of the wreck of the Quidah pirate and of the 
Somerset man-of-war. You will find a little odd 




Edward Winslow. 



remnant of the recollections of the fisheries and 
privateering. You will come back glad that you 
have been to Cape Cod, and sorry that you cannot 
stay there longer. 



182 



TAKKY AT HOME TKAVELS 



Another good centre would be Worcester, 
"the heart of the Commonwealth/' as I said 
just now. An Englishman named Samuel Slater, 
in what is now Pawtucket in Rhode Island, 
really established the cotton manufacture of 




I'UBLIC WuUSlilP AT I'LiVMOUTH BY THE I'lLGRlMS. 



America. In time the Cabots were before him at 
Beverly. Slater came up to Worcester one day, 
it must have been in the thirties of the last 
century, and young Pliny Merrick said to him, 
''We shall never have any large factories in 
Worcester, because we have but little water-power 



MASSACHUSETTS 183 

here." Mr. Slater replied: ''Mr. Merrick, you 
will live to see the day when Worcester needs all 
the water in its Mill Brook to feed the steam- 
engines which will be running in this valley." 
His prophecy was long since true, for they had 
to build the great reservoir up in their hills 
to feed their steam-engines, the locomotives 
among the rest. 

I have said twenty times in print and elsewhere 
that Worcester, which was once my home, is a 
Western town in the heart of New England; 
and this is still true. Here are the old New 
England dignities, even conventionalities and 
etiquettes, and here is the ''run-with-the-machine " 
and ''get-out-of-the-way-boy" of a great Western 
city. I do not think they know themselves how 
many nationalities are here. I do not say how 
many Swedish churches there are, because they 
will build another while I am reading the proof. 
Armenians ? Yes ! French Canadians ? Oh, yes, 
of course. And so on and so on. But still the 
old sturdy Worcester of Isaiah Thomas, when 
after the battle of Lexington he put his printing- 



184 TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

press and his types into wagons in Boston, and, 
arriving three or four days after, printed the 
Massachusetts Spy in Worcester, which he 
and his have printed from that day to this year. 
Ah ! there were nianv of tlie antislaverv vears 




The Wayside Inn, Sudbury, Mass. 
(Present Day.) 

when the Spy was as another gospel to these 
Worcester Count}^ farmers. 

The reader must let me stop, for another minute, 
to tell how the town came to be named Worces- 
ter. Governor Andros, whom we all hated be- 



MASSACHUSETTS 



185 



cause he was James the Second's man, had to 
order a session of the General Court of Massa- 
chusetts. So they came together and they meant 
to do something before he prorogued them, 
as they knew he would do. What would be a 
good thing to do? Why, here is a petition from 
some settlers by Lake 
Quinsigamond who 
want to be made a 
township. Yes, we 
will charter them. 
And so we will show 
King James that we 
can create a town. 
And what shall we 
name the town ? We 
will name it Worces- 
ter, because with 

Worcester in England Charles II got his worst 
thrashing, and ran away as fast as his horse 
would carry him, for his exile of nine years. Let 
him put that in his pipe and smoke it. There is a 
good deal of that sort of Worcester left. It is to 




Senator Hoar. 



186 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Worcester that Carroll AVriglit has been called 
to manage the academic college in Clark Univer- 
sity, which Stanley Hall launched and directs. 
Mr. Salisbury, one of Worcester's public-spirited 
citizens, died a few months ago. He has by the 
princely bequests in his will given a firm founda- 
tion to what will be one of the finest galleries of 
painting and sculpture in the country. And from 
Worcester, if you look at any map of that 
county, you w411 see that there extend six 
spider-webs of railroads, which will take 3'ou 
anywhere. It is the Worcester from which dear 
Senator Hoar started whenever he went to 
Washington. 

When I lived in Worcester, we used to laugh 
about the street corner below Brinley Hall. We 
used to say that if the Chief Justice of the United 
States died, a few of the Worcester men would get 
together on that corner and determine who was his 
proper successor from the leaders of the County 
Bar. Dr. Samuel Haven, one of our modest 
students of history, used to have his joke in saying 
that Timothy Ruggles, of Worcester County, would 




18/ 



MASSACHUSETTS 189 

have been the proper mihtary chief in the Revoki- 
tion if by misfortune he had not been a Tory 
attached to King George. We took Artemas 
Ward of Shrewsbury. 

To this hour those Worcester County people have 
a fashion of thinking a good deal for themselves. It 
was my business in 1888, analyzing the vote of 
Worcester County after the election of the younger 
Harrison, to find, to the confusion of people who 
distrust universal suffrage and think we ought to 
have a property quahfication, and all that ^'you 
know," the somewhat interesting fact that there 
were more landholders in the territorial boundary 
of the city of Worcester than there were voters in 
that critical election. A young fellow walks into a 
bank parlor in Worcester, shows them his new in- 
vention in wood or in horsehair, in wool, in ivory, 
in steel, or in copper, and the Worcester banker sees 
that the young fellow does not drink, nor play 
cards, nor swear, and he gives him a discount be- 
cause he was born in Worcester County. And then 
the young fellow goes away, and before j^ou have 
done with him, he is in business correspondence 



190 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



with the Sultun of some unexplored region in Cen- 
tral Africa. This was the Worcester of my time, and 
I fancy it is the Worcester of to-day. In my time 
there was not a manufacturing corporation in the 
city. Every man made his own invention, took out 

his own patent, drove his 
own steam-engine, and 
made his own fortune. 

A n 1 h e r charming 
centre is farther west at 
Pittsfield. Here, again, 
two lines of railway 
cross each other. Here 
are some of the most 
intelligent and charm- 
ing people in the world. 
And here they have been since the place was 
called Wendellhoro, and Dr. Holmes's ancestors 
lived here. You may go north to Greylock, 
determined to send your son to Williams College ; 
you may go south down the valley of the Housa- 
tonic, and make a call on Asaph Hall, the great 
astronomer, as he lives among the shadows of 




Henry Laurens Dawes. 





^.^^^^^lU^^^ 



191 



MASSACHUSETTS 193 

the hills. Here lived and here died our honored 
friend Henry Laurens Dawes, who maintained 
the good name of Massachusetts so long in the 
Senate at Washington. Here was one man who 
understood the Indian problem, and while he 
held the reins nobody talked of dishonor in our 
dealings with the Indians. The story is told of 
Charles Sumner that he said of supposed corrup- 
tion in Washington that nobody had ever ap- 
proached him with a dishonorable proposal. 
We Massachusetts people boast that from his 
day to our day that story could be applied to 
either of our Senators. Just before he died Mr. 
Dawes had delivered a few lectures at Dartmouth 
College, and perhaps Williams College, on matters 
connected with government. What a pity that 
he could not have lived for a generation more, 
if it were only to give us such results of his 
experience ! 

I will not send this sheet away till I have said 
to any young traveller that I have found it a good 
practice wherever I journey to see the people 
who make the laws of a country. I never go 



194 



TARflY AT HOxME TRAVELS 



to Loiulon but I ask them at our Legation to give 
me what passes they can into the gallery of the 




Charles Sumner. 
Frum a photograph in possession of F. J. Garrison, Esq. 

House of Commons, and I sit there night after 
night to see how England is governed. In the 



MASSACHUSETTS 195 

same way I have sat hours in the gallery of the 
Chambers at Paris and in the elegant gallery of 
the Parliament of Spain. In travelling in America 
I always try to go into the state Capitol, wherever 
it is, and see their methods. Yon get a great 
deal more than mere information as to legis- 
lative customs and laws; you see a great deal 
of the character of the people. So this I say to 
the intelligent traveller, that in either of these 
states of which I have been speaking he may 
get good lessons for himself, be he President, 
Judge, Senator, or sixteenth assistant in an Audi- 
tor's office at Washington, if he will go into the 
gallery of either state legislature and see with 
what dignity and promptness these legislators 
address themselves to their duties. Just now I 
am reading Gladstone, to see with amazement 
how well the English Parliament goes on in the 
hands of five or six hundred gentlemen in England 
who take upon themselves the direction of that 
empire. And I lay down that book with a certain 
American pride, that when you send two or three 
hundred men to the state legislature for a few 



196 



TARRY AT HO:VIE TRAVELS 



montliS; taking them from mill, forge, fishing- 
boat, counting-room, pulpit, garden, farm, quarry, 
or whatever other range of life you choose, when 
you follow them to the House of Representatives 

or to the Senate 
of their state, the 
whole machinery 
of legislation 
moves forward 
w i t h a I) s 1 u t e 
dignity, as if each 
man were trained 
in hereditary 
succession to 
make laws for his 
people. So, in- 
deed, each man is, 
if he have the good luck to be born in New England. 
How does Massachusetts show in the Hall of 
Fame? By hook or by crook, we succeeded, a 
fair majority of us, in selecting twenty-nine 
names for Miss Gould's list of heroes. They were 
to be the names of Americans by birth who had 




Profe^mjk Asa (iuay. 



MASSACHUSETTS 197 

died more than ten years before our selection. 
Well, out of the twenty-nine, Massachusetts had 
fifteen, if you will let us count in Channing, Daniel 
Webster, Beecher, and Asa Gray. This includes 
Longfellow who was born in IMaine when it was a 
part of Massachusetts. 

She had John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel 
Webster, Joseph Story, George Peabody, Eli Whit- 
ney, Samuel F. B. Morse, Asa Gray, Jonathan 
Edwards, Horace Mann, Henry Ward Beecher, 
Ral})h Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
Henry Longfellow, William EUery Channing. 

In the picture gallery of Harvard College we 
have three Presidents, — John Adams, John 
Quincy Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes, be- 
cause he was at our Law School. Hayes was born 
and educated in boyhood in Ohio. Still, these 
will do for our fame in the hall where for one 
reason or another we could not include John 
Hancock, Samuel Adams, Edward Everett, Wen- 
dell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry 
Laurens Dawes, and George Frisbie Hoar. Hall 
of Fame or not, they are dear to us. 



CHAPTER VI 
RHODE ISLAND 

The Island of Rhode Island is in Narragansett 
Bay. Fashion is not a fool, and fashion in 
America has selected the Island of Rhode Island 
as the best place to live in for six months of the 
year. From this beautiful island the ''State of 
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" is 
named. ''Little Rhody," it is affectionately 
called by its inhabitants. The books will tell 
you that Rhode Island was named by its dis- 
coverer, Adrian Block, from the island of Rhodes 
in the ^Egean Sea. But the books give no reason, 
nor does anybody give any reason, why Adrian 
Block should have named the island which he 
discovered after the ^Egean; nobody knows that 
he ever was in the iFgean. 

According to me, when Block swept into Nar- 
ragansett Bay he found a splendid grove of rho- 

198 



RHODE ISLAND 



199 



dodendron. If you wish to be accurate, this was 
the rhododendron maximum of Gray and the 
modern botanists. It is the finest flower in the 




Ochre Point, Nkwiout. 

"Fasliion in America has selected the Island of Rhode Island as the 

best place to live in for six months of the year." 

American flora. Adrian Block saw it then for 
the first time. 

Hard a port ! Now close to shore sail ! 
Starboard now, and drop your foresail ! 
See, boys, what yon bay discloses, 
What yon open bay discloses ! 
Where the breeze so gently blows is 
Heaven's own land of ruddy roses. 



200 TAREY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Past the Cormorant we sail, 

Past the rippHug Beaver Taih 
Green with summer, red with flowers. 
Green with summer, fresh with showers, 
Sweet with song and red with flowers, 
Is this new-found land of ours ! 

Roses close above the sand, 

Roses on the trees on land, 
I shall take this land for my land, 
Rosy beach and rosy highland, 
And I name it Roses Island. 

According to me, Block named the island Roses 
Island when he saw this magnificent spectacle. 
If you will come and see me where I write, not 
far away, and come before July is over, I will 
take you into a rhododendron covert, where 
you may see the same thing. So far as I know, 
no one excepting the immediate circle of my 
dearest friends believes in this interpretation or 
etymology. But it is within this generation that 
I published it to the world, and we will still hope 
that it will gradually reach its place at the head 
of the theories about the name of Rhode Island. 
(Since I put this statement into print an atten- 
tive correspondent tells me that Roger Williams 



RHODE ISLAXD 



201 



says in one of his letters that the island was 
named from the roses on its shores.) 

As I have said already, the best way to go to 




Jean Baptists Donatien de Vimeure, Comte de Rochambeau. 
1725—1807. 

Newport is to go in a friend's yacht from Provi- 
dence. The voyage may take you a longer or 
shorter time, according as the yacht has steam 
power or has not; according as winds are north 
or south. But you will not care much for that. 



202 



TAKEY AT HOME TRAVELS 



It will be a pleasant voyage, anyway. So pleasant 
is it that you will not be far amiss if, going to 
New York from Boston, you go as your grand- 
father used to do — in a steamboat from Provi- 
dence. It is not so large as the Fall River steam- 
boat, but it gives you this charming bay. Every 

inch of that has its 
story^, if you should 
happen to find some 
old sachem who can 
tell you that story. 
^'Stoiy? God bless 
you!" Yes. Stories 
of Roger Williams, of 
Canonicus and Canon- 
chet, of Wampum (ask 
William Weeden to 
tell you that); stories of King Philip, and of 
Tower Hill, and of the Narragansett fight ; stories 
of the capture of the Gaspee; stories of the 
capture of Prescott; stories of Rochambeau, of 
Chastellux, of Lafayette and a hundred brave 
Frenchmen; stories of a thousand pretty girls 




Chevalier de Chastellux. 



RHODE ISLAND 



203 



whom they danced and flirted with; stories of 
the slave trade, of the De Wolfs and the Hoppers 
and the Herreshoffs ; stories of clambake — stories 
enough even if the voyage should last from June 
to October. And by the time you come to the 




"Destruction of the Schooner 'Gaspee' in the Waters of 
Rhode Island, 1772." 
From an old engraving. 

rough turning of Point Judith you will be asleep 
in your stateroom and the rough sea will not 
trouble you. 

Point Judith ? — Just a word about Point Judith. 
Pear old John Hull, the same who coined the first 
silver money for Massachusetts and showed to 



204 TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Cromwell and King Charles and the sachems of 
New England that Massachusetts had the sover- 
eign rights of coining money — this same John 
Hull had a daughter Judith. If you are well up 
in your Hawthorne, you know that the night 
Samuel Sewall (afterwards Chief Justice, the 
same who hanged the witches) married Judith 
Hull, old John Hull, her father, put her into one 
scale of the balance and poured pine-tree shillings 
into the other enough to weigh her down. One 
hundred and twenty-five pounds sterling the 
girl weighed, if you will trust me who have read 
the same in the manuscript ledger of her new 
husband. This, according to Hawthorne, was 
her dower. 

Well, this same John Hull and his sometime 
son-in-law Sewall went into a fine speculation in 
the southern part of Rhode Island, and bought 
the Petaquamscot Purchase from the Indians 
of their day. If you care, dear reader, it is in 
my own house in the Petacjuamscot Purchase 
overlooking Point Judith, when I look out of 
the window, that I am dictating these words. 



EHODE ISLAND 



205 



Well, dear old John Hull, whose grandchildren's 
great-grandchildren came in here just now with 
the Providence Journal, wanted to give to 
this outlying point a name, and he gave it Judith 
Hull's name, I think, before she was Judith Sewall. 
One of my New 
Hampshire corre- 
spondents, sniff- 
ing at the ocean 
and all it brings 
with it, asks me 
if he named Ju- 
dith Hull from 
Point Judith; if 
she were misty 
and frigid and 
stormy and dis- 
agreeable in gen- 
eral, and if it were fair that he should borrow 
the name from the storm-washed point for the 
baby who was to be, as it proved, the ances- 
tor of heroes. Dr. Holmes's Dorothy Q, for in- 
stance, is in that line. But the New Hampshire 




Samuel Sewall. 
From an old eiigraviuj 



20G TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

correspondent is all wrong. Judith Hull was not 
named from Point Judith; Point Judith was 
named from Judith Hull. 

And while we are gossiping about the first 
Petaquamscot Purchase I may as well say that 
some of the Narragansett Indians took Roger 
WiUiams to what we call here ^' Sugar Loaf Hill" 
and bade him survey the prospect. One is re- 
minded of the '^exceeding high mountain" of 
another story. They told Roger Williams, who 
seems to have l^elievcd it, that some of their 
ancestors went from Petaquamscot to the regions 
of the Blue Hills in Massachusetts. And they 
gave Roger Williams to understand that when 
the Massachusetts people exiled him to the Nar- 
ragansett country he came back to the centre of 
New England civilization, which lay around these 
waters of what we call ''Salt Pond." What I 
know is that when Judge Sewall died, he and 
his wife Hannah left a farm of five hundred acres 
here at Petaquamscot to Harvard College, and 
the college still uses the income towards the 
"support and education of youths at college, 



EHODE ISLAND 



207 



especially such as shall be sent from Petaquam- 
scot aforesaid, English or Indian, if any such there 
be." So we are trying to repay Judith's debts. 
Hannah, if anybody cares, was the successor of 
Judith. 
'Roger Williams soon found, I think, that the 




Landixg uf Roger Williams. 
From an old engraving. 

Puritan oligarchs of Massachusetts Bay had 
''kicked him upstairs," as our English friends 
say. He wrote to somebody that in our Rhode 
Island country he had seen at one time straw- 
berries enough in fruit to load a ship with. In- 
deed, it is in this same letter that we have the 
famous epigram of his friend Dr. Boteler, that 



208 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

God might have made a better berry, but that He 
never did. Whoever is bragging about our Con- 
tinent to an effete Europe may like to say that 
the introduction of the American strawberry 
into the gardens of the old world resulted in a 
manifold and manifest improvement of the straw- 
berry of to-day over the strawberry of Virgil and 
Pliny. 

Dear Roger ^Yilliams, he went and came in this 
region, he traversed our beautiful lakes in his 
canoe, and he learned the language of Canonicus 
and the rest, and preserved it for posterity. He 
has left us one and another of sidelights on his 
time which interpret to us his own good sense and 
religious philosophy. 

I am fond of saying that I like to live in New 
England and that I like to live in the South; 
that Providence has, therefore, chosen for me 
this summer home of mine as far south as one can 
go and stay in New England all the time. This 
is certain, that our poor scattered Algonquins, 
be they Penacooks or Mystics or Naticks or 
Abernakis or Aberginians, as they froze in oiu' 



EHODE ISLAND 



209 



average New England temperature of forty-three 
degrees, felt their blood run faster and life more 
beautiful when a south wind blew in upon them. 
So in their imaginative 
mood they fancied that 
heaven was in the south- 
west. They thought they 
were nearer heaven in 
Rhode Island than they 
were on the slopes of the 
White Mountains. If 
they could keep in the 
open air here more than 
they could there, they were 
right in this conception. 

Whatever the legend 
of ''Sugar Loaf HiU" may 
be worth, there is no 

RlXiKK W 1LLIAJI8. 

doul3t that the Narragan- statue by Franklin Simmons, 

at Providence, R. I. 

setts, who made this region 

their home, were the superiors in government, in 
commerce, in language, in the whole range of sav- 
age civilization, of all the New England Indians. 




210 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Williams liked them and they liked him, and for 
nearly fifty years his relations with their leaders 
proved to be of great value to the infant con- 
federacy of New England. According to me, his 
studies of the Indian character with his studies 
of the Indian language are the most important 
documents of that time which we have left in our 
too scanty ethnological libraries. 

Do not neglect by any means to go to Bristol — 
quaint, old-fashioned, historical, and beautiful. 
You see there were days when the maritime com- 
merce of Bristol was, I think, C][uite equal to that 
of New York; certainly it was in advance over 
that of Boston. To hold the Narragansett Bay 
was the ambition of the English commanders 
through the Revolution. And there is many a 
Revolutionary story, now of battle, now of ad- 
venture, now of intrigue, of these waters, and of 
those shores. Look on the right pane of the 
right window and you shall find where some 
modest patriot wrote on the glass what he seems 
not to have dared to say to the face of ''the in- 
comparable Miss Abby Brown." 




Captain Esek Hopkins, 
"Commandant en Chef la Flotte Americaine. 



211 



RHODE ISLAND 213 

It was the Bristol slave traders whom Mr. 
Webster rebuked in his Plymouth address of 
1820. 1808 marked the year when the slave 
trade was prohibited almost of course by Con- 
gress. But the shackles were still forged in 
Bristol County in Massachusetts, and the shackles 
went from Bristol in Rhode Island to the West 
African shore. 

The yachtsmen still exult in the name of 
HerreshofT, and in the fame which Bristol has 
won when she has sent out such boats as the 
Columbia and the Defender and the other cham- 
pions of the sea. Whoever wants to see one of 
the finest memorials of the finest old life of New 
England must obtain an introduction which shall 
open to him the doors of the Herreshoff home- 
steads. 

Bristol does not send shackles to Africa any 
longer; but very likely, my dear Annabel, when 
you walk across the snowy sidewalk next Decem- 
ber, you will be wearing Bristol overshoes. I do 
not mean to intimate that they are too small 
for those pretty feet. 



214 TAKllY AT HOME TKAVELS 

I think the audacity of the Rhode Islanders in 
their early conflict with the English navy on one 
point and another of Narragansett Bay gives them 
the highest place in the chronological history of 
our independence. Our first Admiral Hopkins 
was a Rhode Islander. When he stole the pow- 
der from Bermuda and the Bahamas and sent it 
up to poor Washington at Cambridge, he did the 
right thing at the right time. Paul Jones never 
can say too much of his Narragansett seamen. 
In those days, indeed, Rhode Island supphed 
the West Indies with what they wanted to eat and 
with the horses which the Islanders rode upon. 
We have changed all that, for horses and wheat 
now go from another valley nearer the West 
Indies and far away from New England. 

But in those days Berkeley, resting as he made 
the })reparations for tlu^ great American College 
at Bermuda, gave Newport its first fame among 
men and women of letters. And he is remem- 
bered here as I suppose he is not remembered 
anywhere else but in California. "Westward the 
star of empire takes its way." The reader will 



EHODE ISLAND 215 

remember that Dartmouth CoUege is the child 
of Wheelock, who was a beneficiary under 
Berkeley's bequest to Yale College. I have no 
Rhode Island excursion which pleases me more 
than my visit to the Berkeley Museum which 
the Colonial Dames have established in Berkeley's 
old home at Newport. A good portrait of Berke- 
ley is among the treasures at Yale College in 
New Haven, where Berkeley made himself a real 
friend. ''The Minute Philosophy" and others of 
the really scientific philosophical books — Mrs. 
Eddy would say prophetical books — were 
thought out in Berkeley's walks at Newport. 
I have fancied that the freshness of the sea breeze 
and the tonic of the surf might be traced in them 
to this day. 

Something — and the reader must tell me 
what — has given to the State of Rhode Island 
and Providence Plantations a race of Idealists, 
such as is hard to parallel elsewhere in a period 
so short as the time since Roger Williams landed 
at Mosshassuck. Here is Williams himself, with 
all his claims to being the earliest prophet of 



216 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



real freedom of conscience. Here is Berkeley; 
there are the traditions of George Fox, and the 
warm welcome which Rhode Island gave him. 
For here was the one haven of rest for the Quak- 
ers in the days before William Penn established 

for them another. I 
have worshipped in 
the Quaker meeting- 
house which was built 
in honor of George 
Fox's first visit here. 
It must have been 
that the absolute in- 
dependence of every 
man as he approaches 
his God, not to say of 
every hamlet as it 
built its roads or its schoolhouse, had something 
to do with this vein of mysticism oi- idealism 
which runs all through Rhode Island history. 
Here was Samuel Hopkins, the preacher, with 
his protest against the slave trade, when the slave 
trade was all the fashion in Providence and in 




Gkorge Fox. 



RHODE ISLAND 217 

Rhode Island. Aiid here was WiUiam Elleiy Chan- 
ning, who remembered his own shudder when as a 
boy he heard Hopkins describe hell fire with enthu- 
siasm. Here was Rowland Hazard, first of that 
honored name, who taught us that man is a 
Creative Force, the first antagonist to Jonathan 
Edwards worthy of his steel. Here was Jemima 
Wilkinson, who led to New York the first colony 
which was tolerated by the savage Iroquois. 
Here was Alice Rathburn, the charm of whose 
eloquence is still referred to with love by the old 
people up and down through the ''South 
County," while no word that she said has been 
remembered. 

Indeed, it is the same individualism which to 
this hour makes the farmer build his house 
as far from the next one as possible. It was 
this same individualism which made Rhode 
Island the last of the thirteen states to join in 
the Union. It was not, I think, that her leaders 
saw any special difficulties in the Federal Con- 
stitution. It was rather that they did not want 
to do what other people do. I am afraid that 



218 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



that characteristic Hngers among some of them 
to this day. 



■ 


P^ -^ i^l 


■ 


^^H 


r ^^m 


^^1 


^^^^^H 


f ■ ' ^.^^ 


^^^^H 


^I^^H^^IV 


'^- : -JH 


^^^^^^^^■1 


^^^^^^HR^^ 


Jy 41 


l^^^l 


IP^^^L 




1 




"George," said a friend of mine to his friend, 
''I hear thee is drawn on the juiy." 

''Yes, friend, I am on the juiy. It is just in 
haying time, too !" 



RHODE ISLAND 219 

^^Well, George, thee has only to Hsten to the 
other eleven, and agree to what the men of most 
sense say." 

''Agree ! Friend, I shall agree with nobody !" 

There is Roger Williams in the twentieth 
century. 

Dear Richard Greenough used to say to me 
that in matters of art Newport was an American 
Venice. He used to ask me whether we might 
not manufacture a theory in which south winds 
off the sea, with those fogs which soften harsh 
outlines, and that more even temperature which 
soothes all audacity, shall I say with a sort of 
dew which belongs to a high revelation half con- 
cealed, — he used to say that all this gave to 
men in the Italian Venice a charm of color, a 
certain indecision in outline and with it a wealth 
of fancy and imagination which had made - the 
Venetian school of art. According to Richard, 
you may trace such influences of climate in the 
work of Titian, Veronese, of Tintoretto, and the 
rest, and according to him there is a school of 
our American younger art which belongs to this 



\ 

220 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

American Venice, a Venice on an island, a Venice 
where you go about in boats, a Venice where the 
water plashes against your door-step, and where 
the south winds blow off the sea. He remembered 




Gilbert Stuart. 



that our dear old Smibert was established here, 
Cople3^'s teacher. He said that such was the 
training-place of Malbone, of Gilbert Stuart, 
and Allston, and, in our later days, of Stagg. 
And why else had he gone down there to live 



RHODE ISLAND 221 

himself? Where did Hunt go? and where is 
Miss Jane Hunt to-day? Why else did Mr. 
Richards make his home as near this Venice as 
he could? Wliy else are there so many pictures 
of the best on the walls of your friends in Provi- 
dence and Bristol and Newport? 

I was talking one day with a very charming 
Rhode Island lady, who lived in Providence, 
whose benefactions have made her known to 
half the world. She said to me, very simply, 
''Yes, I had rather live in a workshop than in a 
tradeshop." She meant that she hked to live 
in a state where everybody you meet makes 
something. We call it manufacture, but they 
do not make things by hand any more. They 
set going a bit of machinery, and the wheels 
rattle and the pistons slide, while they go off 
to the tops of the Pyramids or to the South 
Antarctic to reach the Southern Pole. Somehow 
or other, more things are made by these five 
hundred thousand people than are made by so 
many people anywhere else in the world, so they 
tell me, and I suppose it is tine. 



222 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

When I go to Byfield as above, they tell me they 
first made woollen cloth there. I do not know 
how it is, but in South Kingston, here, they tell 
me that the first Rowland Hazard was the first 
person to weave woollen thread by anything like 
our modern machinery. What I know is that 
our Peacedale won the Imperial Prize at Paris 
as being the best-organized town of manufacture 
in the world. What I know is that there is hardly 
a waterfall in Rhode Island which is not chained. 
I remember how a Providence man once said to 
me that there were twenty villages every Sunday 
in the broad aisle of the church where he wor- 
shipped God. 

How does this happen? It happens thus: 
that the Gulf Stream moves silently and steadily 
along the shore. It feeds the fogs rising from 
the ocean and drifting slowly over the mainland. 
It means that the dew distils from heaven; if 
only men would remember that it is from heaven 
that it distils. So when other streams run 
diy, the ponds in Rhode Island, my pond under 
my window here, Worden's Pond, two miles 



RHODE ISLAND 223 

west of me, Quidnick Pond, Witchaug Pond, 
Mahwansecut Pond, are full, while elsewhere 
men are talking of artificial reservoirs for their 
water or are shutting down their machinery 
because no water flows. Rhode Island is the 
first manufacturing state in the world, they tell 
me,, because the good God of. heaven made her 
ponds in these high lands which are not mountains, 
and give her steady reservoirs, on which she can 
draw when the rest of the world is dry. Well, 
what we call material laws, as I study them, 
prove to belong in the will of the same God whom 
I call the Holy Spirit. Anyway, it happens, as 
we irreverently say, that by the side of Worden's 
Pond I find there grew up such a man as Corliss, 
who with one stroke enlarged the power of man- 
kind by fifteen per cent. I wish that I thought 
mankind were grateful enough to him for the 
benefaction. 

A state of Idealists, you tell me. Yes, and of 
idealists who know what it is to bring in the 
kingdom. This is what Mrs. Richmond meant 
and what her life illustrated. We do not let 



224 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

women file right or file left or hold their muskets 
two inches from their noses; we do not let them 
fling themselves against the walls of Peking or 
Badajos; but such a woman as Mrs. Richmond 
or Miss Bradley signs a check, after she has 
taken advice, and then a dam is built across 
some stream and a turbine goes to work in the 
water, spinning-frames make thread of cotton or 
of wool, and the looms weave it into cloth soft 
enough, if you please, for the cradle of an emperor's 
baby; and close to the turbine and the water- 
fall and the spinning-frame and the loom are 
hundreds of happy homes where the boys grow 
up to be men and the girls to be women, with 
the sky blue over their heads, and the fields 
green out of the windows, and the forests all 
ready for the children to wander in and be happy 
in and build their castles of pine needles. I do 
not wonder that Mrs. Richmond liked to live hi 
her workshop. 

We must hurry away. We must go to Con- 
necticut and sec how they handle the problems 
there. But we do not leave Rhode Island with- 



EHODE ISLAND 



225 



out remembering the Browns, and Brown Uni- 
versity, and Francis Wayland, who gave that 
University its fame for half a century. Let 




Francis Wayland. 
" The first educator of his time." 



me ask in a parenthesis what is that matchless 
power by which some board of trustees picks 
out a young preacher named Francis Wayland 



226 TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 

"when he began to be about thirty years of age," 
and places him where he proves to be the first 
educator of his time? Remember that, ye 
boards of appointment who have to deal with 
the nominations of men who are to serve the 
world "when they began to be about thirty years 
of age." "\Miat Garfield said of Mark Hopkins 
could have been said of this leader of half a 
centur}', that you could make a university if you 
put Francis Wayland at ' ' one end of a pine slab 
and his pupil at the other." 

Xor let me forget Washington's great second. 
I asked Jared Sparks once what would have 
happened if Washington had been killed in any 
of the fighting around Pliiladelphia, in 1777, in 
the Revolution. Sparks said to me that if 
Nathanael Greene could have taken his place, all 
would have been well; that Greene was fit to 
discharge every duty which Washmgton dis- 
charged. .\nd I think Sparks said that Washing- 
ton knew this. You know the state of Georgia 
gave Greene a plantation because he rescued it. 
And it will not hurt vou to remember that on 



EHODE ISLAND 227 

that plantation Eli Whitney invented the cotton- 
gin and so changed the history of the world. 

And when you come to spend your six months 
in Rhode Island, do not forget to find out Green- 
wich, which was the home of the Greenes, and 
spend a night, if you please, at the ''Bunch of 
Grapes." Or go down, if you please, to hear the 
boys recite their Virgil in Greenwich Academy. 
And for one more person in Rhode Island, let 
me remind you of the charming story of John 
Carter Brown, the millionaire who was willing 
to be linked with the despised and rejected John 
Brown of Harper's Ferry. 




Fort Connamcut, R.I. 



CHAPTER VII 

CONNECTICUT 

Every political advance, every sane constitu- 
tion of government, every crisis, and every step 
taken for human freedom goes to the mainte- 
nance of happy homes. This is George Frisbie 
Hoar's central statement. For us, 
the laws of Alfred, Magna Charta, 
the fight at Naseby, the Bill of 
Rights, the Declaration of Inde- 
^^^^ -e^W pendence. Constitutional Govern- 
ment the Union of States, all 
have meant that men should have Happy Homes. 
Connecticut has perhaps woi'ked her name into 
history as the state which is most successful 
in this business. Compare Switzerland with her 
in that line, if you choose. Compare Vermont. 
But Connecticut is older than Vermont, and her 
history from the beginning has been the history 

228 




CONNECTICUT 



229 



of groups of men who came together in different 
places, and hved together, and made laws, each 
community for itself, simply that they might 
have happy homes — Home Rule. You see, they 




Captain Wadsworth concealing the Charter of Connecticut. 

have as yet no piling up of people in prison cells 
called "apartments," nor crowding together in 
barracks called "tenements" — or they have not 
many such. I have heard a man say that in their 
largest city — in New Haven or in Hartford — a 
man can get more out of life than he can in any 
other city in the world. I am not sure but this 
is true. 



230 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

The ''land of steady habits/' people I'sed to 
say; and before they said that they used to make 
up absurd codes and say that they were the 
''Blue Laws of Connecticut." These "Blue Law" 
codes, as they were printed, were fictions; but the 
fiction itself implies what is true — that in the 
making of laws in their little assemblies these 
people always had the fundamental idea of Right. 
It was not for expediency, it was not for profit, 
but it was to fulfil the law of the Living God, 
that the first generation legislated. Well, from 
such a little state as that large things have fol- 
lowed. The A\\>stern Reserve in Ohio was a new 
Connecticut, where the land was fertile and the 
winters were not cold, where every seed would 
bear fruit an hundred fold. And Connecticut 
may well claim the credit for what the Western 
Reserve has done : in our own time, for Gid- 
dings and Hayes and Garfield and Grant, — 
I must not say, foi- the Church of Latter-Day 
Saints, which I suppose the Western Reserve 
perhaps would be glad to forget. Mr. Calhoun 
once said that he remembered a session of the 



CONNECTICUT 



231 



National House of Representatives when nearly 
half of the members of the House were gradu- 
ates of Yale College or natives of Connecticut. 




The Charter Oak. 



I think the minority of such people was only 
five less than the majority. 

Somewhere in the fifties of. the last century a 
French gentleman called on me who had been 
sent out from France by Louis Napoleon, or 
somebody, to study American education. As in 



232 TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 

duty bound, he had gone first into Canada. He 
had learned all he could about education in Can- 
ada, and then he had been attracted, as La Salle 
was, to the Valley of the Mississippi, and he had 
'^done" the ancient Louisiana; that is, he had 
gone through all the states of our Middle West 
on what people call an '^ educational" visit. He 
had reserved New England for the end. And he 
said to me : '^Everywhere I found that the teachers 
in the American schools, whether of Canada or 
the Mississippi Valley, are from two provinces — 
Massachusetts and Connecticut. I said to myself. 
This is unheard of in history — that all the people 
in a large nation shall be taught by teachers from 
two of its smallest subdivisions. And I asked for 
the statistics for the l^irth of the teachers, and 
nobody knew anything about it. But I said, 
When I come to Connecticut and Massachusetts 
I can obtain the statistical information on this 
subject. And now I have come here nobody 
knows anything about it and nobody cares." 

I promised to provide^ for him some sort of 
official report on this business, and so I asked a 



CONNECTICUT 233 

dear old sachem, a near friend of mine, how many 
of the young people of his particular town, when 
they left school, began as teachers somewhere 




Oliver Ellsworth. 
An eminent Connecticut statesman and jurist. 

or other. He heard me with some impatience, 
and then said, '^Why, all of them, of course!" 
This exclamation of his corresponds quite nearly 
with what at one time was the Southern impression 



234 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

regarding the New England schoolmaster. He 
was a Connecticut man. In the southern part 
of the nation there is many an old joke or epi- 
gram or anecdote which belongs to the period 
when a Connecticut Yankee was spoken of as 
talking through his nose and rolling his R's and 
''teaching school." 

One may say in passing that that abominable 
expression is pure Yankee, and it is heard nowhere 
but in the purest Yankee literature. 

In our day Connecticut feels, as all the rest of 
New England feels, the wave of European and 
Canadian emigration. The old-line rulers of 
Connecticut, the sons of her own soil who grew 
up used to home rule, are worried more or less 
liy finding voters who neither know nor care 
whether they live in Connecticut or in Dakota 
so far as history goes. They are citizens of the 
United States, but do not know what the three 
vines on the seal of Connecticut mean, nor who 
invented the motto of the state of Connecticut. 
But, for all that and all that, they retain stead- 
fastly in Connecticut some of the old stand-by 



CONNECTICUT 



235 



habits of home rule. It is worth while to say this 
if I am writing for people who come from the West 




Jonathan Trumbull, Governor of Connecticut, 17G9-1783. 
Said to have been the original " Brother Jonathan." 

and South to enjoy the seashore at Watch Hill, at 
Saybrook, at New Haven, or anywhere on the 



236 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Sound. We cannot do enough to awaken local 
pride by the study of local history in regions 
which are inhabited by people who have no local 
pride and know nothing of local history. I have 
said this whenever I could in public schools and 
in these papers. 

Our newspapers would be a great deal better 
if some of the people who wrote for them knew 
more of the traditions, even the language, of 
five thousand different centres of American life. 

Remember, for instance, that in that critical 
struggle of the Revolution which we like to go 
back to, there was, strictly speaking, no revolution 
in Connecticut; every form of government went 
on without a break of a hair, as it had done before. 
The elections were the old colonial elections. 
Governor Trumbull was chosen as every other 
Governor had been chosen in every other Connect- 
icut, election from the beginning. Randol})h 
and some of the other English Governors were 
commissioned in 1680 as Governors of New Eng- 
land, but they exercised no power in Connecticut 
except perhaps sending a catch-poll to hunt up 



CONNECTICUT 237 

a fugitive. When the Revolution came, Connect- 
icut had her Governor and her army; she knew 
how to commission her officers and to arm her 
troops. Ethan Allen took Ticonderoga in 1775, 
and told the commander that he did it in the name 
of the great Jehovah and the Continental Con- 



WF^ 1 




^^^^^^H 



Ethan Allex at lu uMH.iiin.A. 



gress. This was a very imaginative use of lan- 
guage. The only commission he had was from 
the state of Connecticut, pnd she used such power 
exactly as she had used it in commissioning 
colonels for one hundred and fifty years. 

Chastellux, who was Rochambeau's favorite 
aide, naturally had many occasions in the Revo- 



238 TARRY' AT HOME TRAVELS 

lution to cross from Newport to the Hudson and 
eventually to Yorktown and back again. The 
journey was always, if you will observe, on horse- 
back. Chastellux says early in his book that in 
all the time when he had been in America he had 
never seen a man of military age who had not 
served against King George. This is good testi- 
mony as to what Connecticut was. It shows 
the other side of the appeals we have from Wash- 
ington to ''Brother Jonathan" when he wanted 
troops of a sudden; and the admirable military 
records of Connecticut, which have been so well 
printed and edited, show how Connecticut be- 
came ready to answer such appeals. When 
in 1776 Washington was sure he must fortify 
New York harbor he sent the Connecticut 
General Ward, the same who had been at Louis- 
burg, to garrison the city with his Connecticut 
men. And afterwards it was Knowlton, who 
was killed within the limits of our Central Park, 
who led the Connecticut regiment that day of 
which Washington said in a general ord(M' that the 
behavior of this corps was worthy of any army 



CONNECTICUT 



239 



in any time. My kinsman Hale belonged there, 
but he was in prison in New York, if indeed he 
were not already dead. 

I forget which of the French gentlemen it is 



't. u. 




d 




A-^f' 








1 


^-1 




1 


j2<^^H 




K 






1 



Hartford. 
From an old engraving. 

who tells that nice story about Greene's early 
training. Rochambeau, with a great staff, was 
riding across country when somebody's horse's 
feet wanted attention. So they stopped at a 
Connecticut town and sent for a blacksmith. 
While the blacksmith was at work some one asked 
Rochambeau what he ''did ter hum." Now 
the truth is that in times of peace a French 



240 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

marechal of Louis XVI. 's Court did not do much 
after he had fanned young ladies or offered snuff 
to princes. But Rochambeau answered that he 
was a Marechal de France. Then the curious 
Yankee followed up his questioning by asking 
what marechal meant, and some very bright 
English-speaking man on the staff answered that 
marechal meant blacksmith. This pleased the 
Yankee. ^'It's an excellent trade/' he said; 
^4t's an excellent trade. Our General Greene is 
a blacksmith." 

I have intimated in another article that if 
you will go up into northwest Connecticut, into 
the neighborhood of Canaan Falls, you will find 
Asaph Hall, the same who discovered the moons 
of Mars, and he will show you the glories of 
hills and valleys and waterfalls on this earth. 
If you will spend a week or two at Norwich — 
they call it the Rose City — you will find a group 
of charming people who would never let me name 
them, and you would have a chance to see how 
an independent town governs itself and how 
all the delights of the highest civilization may 



CONNECTICUT 



241 



be found without the clatter and frills of smoke 
and dust of a great city. In Hartford, as I said, 
or in New Haven, men say that you can get more 
out of life in twenty-four hours than you can 
anjrwhere else in the world. This is sure, that 





«- 








"'^i 


^ 








^■3 


W^' 




^"""l^waSi 


9! 


te^l 




:i._ — 1 :__ 




:^^^m 


PJg 



New Havex, from Ferry Hill. 
From an old eugraving. 

in either of these places, if you sigh for a crowd, 
you may go to New York in three hours. If you 
sigh for the wilderness, the White Mountains 
and the Adirondacks are not much farther away. 
I was at New Haven on the second centennial 
of the beginning of the college. It was a good 
time to see the matchless loyalty of the different 



242 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

classes as they made rendezvous in their old 
home. Wherever you meet these men it is 
interesting to see how they really think that there 
is no other university in the world than theirs. 
They have a fine quotation from something in 
an original document which says that the college 
is created ''for the bringing up of men who may 
be of service to the state." ^ I was pleased the 
other day, when, in trying to find out something 
about their Governor Hopkins, one of the patrons 
of Harvard College while there was yet no Yale 
College, I found the same expression. He died 
in 1659 in London, and in his will endowed some 
New England academies and gave to Harvard 
College the money with which to this hour she 
gives the " Deturs " every year to deserving pupils. 
Worthy remark, is it not, that the money which 
he left, which was distributed to the legatees about 
the time of the Treaty of Utrecht, now yields one 
hundred per cent annually for the uses of this 
trust? Remember this, ye gentlemen of Con- 

' Cromwell, in giving counsel for the education of his sons, 
speaks of service to the state as one of the purposes to be kept 
in mind. 




243 



CONNECTICUT 245 

necticut who live at home at ease, when you 
send down for your friend to ride up from his 
office, and make your will. Men die, but uni- 
versities, they have a good chance to live. There 
are many Hopkinses in America. I wish that 
some one of them would tell me where our Gov- 
ernor Edward Hopkins was born — not in Shrews- 
bury, as Cotton Mather said he was. Was it in 
Ecton? 

It was thirty years ago that one of the most 
distinguished graduates of Yale College said to 
me that it had a great advantage over other institu- 
tions because it pleased the Lord God always to 
send into the world exactly the right person to 
be president at precisely the time when he was 
needed. This prophecy of his has been confirmed 
as the generation has gone by. 

I was about to say that I had two grandfathers 
in Yale College in the seventies of the eighteenth 
century. Nathan Hale, whose statue looks out 
on Broadway, was not my grandfather. He never 
had any children, but he was the brother of my 
grandfather Enoch Hale, and they were together 



24G 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



in college. Nathan Hale was only a little more 
than a year younger than my grandfather. I 




I.YMAX PiEECHER. 



have the letter in which their father, Richard 
Hale, told them that their mother had made cloth 
enough for their winter clothes and one of them 



CONNECTICUT 247 

might ride over to Coventry to be measured for 
both. Nathan Hale took a leading part in the 
''Beggar's Opera" when his society acted it before 
the college government of that day. The tradi- 
tion says that his notes for that mysterious visit 
to New York which ended his life were written 
in Latin, and that he had appeared in New York 
as a Connecticut schoolmaster. 

My children have a great many more Yale ances- 
tors than I. Bright and wise men go to Hartford 
for their wives, and I followed that good example. 
So Lyman Beecher comes into our line, and so it 
is that the later Beechers, who did their duty so 
well a generation ago, are Connecticut born or 
bred. I do not remember if this story of Roxana 
Beecher has ever slipped into print. When she 
and her husband were young married people 
on Long Island, a member of the parish gave to 
her what I suppose was the Edinburgh Cyclopaedia 
as a present. When the young family moved 
up into the mountains of Litchfield County, the 
cyclopaedia went with them. When the first 
winter revealed to them the severities of that 



248 TAREY AT HOME TRAVELS 

high altitude, Mrs. Beecher studied the pictures 
of Russian stoves in the cyclopaedia and con- 
structed the first of such comforts for the par- 
sonage. As I write these words I remember that 

Jcjhn Pierpont, 
the poet, who 
moved from 
Litchfield to 
Boston at about 
that time, in- 
vented a new 
stove which he 
put upon the 
market, and 
when the eccle- 
siastical council 
was called to de- 
joHN PIERPONT. tcniiine whether 

he had or had not done things which a minister 
should not do, the invention of this stove came 
in among the complaints of his enemies. Minis- 
ters ought not to invent stoves any more than 
they ought to write poems for theatres. Yet 




CONNECTICUT 



249 



I remember in later days Dr. Bushnell invented 
a furnace and no one took exception. 

If you want to have a pleasant summer home 
and at the same time be within an easy ride of 
New York, you 
will not go wrong 
if you look up a 
house in that 
same Litchfield. 
The famous Gun- 
nery is not far 
away. The won- 
derful waterfall 
at Bash Bish is 
not far away. I 
believe that is 
within the pres- 
ent line of New York. It was once in what 
they called Boston Corner and was part of 
Massachusetts. But as no Massachusetts sheriff 
could arrest a man in Boston Corner without 
having to carry him through New York or Con- 
necticut as they went to the jail, Boston Corner 




Bash Bish Falls. 



250 



TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



seemed likely to become a place without law, 
and we Massachusetts people gladly added it to 
the territory of New York, though we have not 
much territory to spare. 

New England's first war, one is sorry to say, 
was in Connecticut, and the savage for the first 




DksTKUCTIU-N' of THK PK(JU<>T8. 

time knew who his master was when the train- 
bands stormed the palisades at Mystic. 

Old Dr. Dwight, President of Yale College, 
wrote the first guide-book of New England, and 
that is excellent reading to this day. I have 
spoken of it already. In early life, when he was 
in his poetical vein, he wrote " The Conquest of 
Canaan," and when Washington and the army 
were besieging Boston in 1775 and 177G the Yale 




Dr. Timothy Dwight. 



251 



CONNECTICUT 253 

College tutor came to camp and modestly asked 
the different gentlemen there to subscribe for 
the printing of his poem. My great-uncle, Nathan 
Hale, was there, a lieutenant on Winter Hill. 
He had told his men that they should have all 
his pay as bounties if they would enlist when 
their terms expired. But all the same he sub- 
scribed for ^'The Conquest of Canaan." Alas! 
before the book came to the press Hale was dead. 
Dear Dr. Dwight, as he was to be, wrote in these 
additional lines in memory of his pupil-patron : — 

" So, when fair Science strove in vain to save, 
Hale, doubly generous, found an early grave," 

and so on. 

In the same poem, I forget how, Dr. Dwight 
brings in the Connecticut River. How it got into 
''The Conquest of Canaan" is not of much im- 
portance, but it is here that he says : — 

" No watery gleams through fairer valleys shine, 
Nor drinks the sea a lovelier stream than thine." 

At that moment the only streams which he could 
have seen were the North River, the Pawtuxet 



254 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

River, the Charles River, and possibly the Merrimac. 
But we will grant him a poet's })rivilege and 
even if we have seen a thousand other streams 
drunk up by the sea, we will stand by Dr. Dwight. 
I am afraid that dear Dr. Dwight is more often 
spoken of now as the President of the college 
than as the leading poet of his time. But Con- 
necticut people in particular and their descendants 
of two, three, and four generations ought not 
to forget his verses. As I go over the Railway 
to-day I am almost sorry to see that Stafford 
Springs is becoming a great manufacturing town. 
But the dear old hotel where the invalids of a 
century ago repaired in thcnr own carriages with 
their own spans of horses and their own negro 
drivers is still extant, and, if you will ask at the 
right place, they will show you the sign-board 
which used to be displayed over the bath-house 
with this verse of Dr. Dwight's : — 

"O health, thou dearest source of bliss to man, 
I woo thee here, here at this far-famed Spring. 
Oh, may I ere long welcome thy return ! 
Irradiate my countenance with thy beams. 
And ])lant thy roses on my 2:>allid cheeks ! " 




255 



CONNECTICUT 257 

To tell the whole truth, I never think of Dr. 
Dwight as the theologian encountering Voltaire 
and Volney in the lists of battle, but as a dear 
old poet with the roses of Stafford Springs beam- 
ing on his cheeks once pallid. 

As they are finding radio-activity in mineral 
springs just now, will not some one ride over from 
Hartford and see how much there is at Stafford ? 

Samuel Taylor Maynard, the accomplished 
creator of the school of agriculture at Amherst, 
said to me once that whenever Massachusetts 
wanted to raise her own breadstuffs, she could 
do it in the valley of the Connecticut; and I do 
not dare say how much leaf tobacco the valley 
of the Connecticut will send to the market this 
year — the best, I believe, that the market will 
have to offer. 

It is to us people who live in Massachusetts 
Bay an interesting thing to see that from the 
very beginning we have depended on the West 
for our bread. "Give us this day our daily bread, 
Good God, and we will send for it wherever 
Thou shalt require." Our first Governor, John 



258 TAllRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Winthrop, had to send back to England for meal 
and corn by the very ships which brought him 
and his. They arrived in England in a time really 
of famine. But his friends executed his orders. 
They bought meal of different grades in the high- 
est market of that day and despatched the relief 
ships as promptly as might be. In the Lyon, ojie 
of them, it is said there arrived a certain Robert 
Hale to whom this writer is much obliged, and a 
certain Roger Williams. The Lyon is the ship which 
came up the Bay when a Fast Day had been 
ordered by the Massachusetts Board of Assistants. 
She broke open her hatches — and the Board 
ordered the Fast Day changed to a Thanksgiving 
Day, the first Thanksgiving Day known in the Bay. 
That lesson was enough for Winthrop, and with 
that spring (1631) he sent the first trading shallops 
into this valley of the Connecticut to buy for us 
the grain which he would turn into meal for 
feeding his fifteen hundred people^ for the next 
year. And from that day to this day the Bay 
has bought its breadstuff s from the West. Just 
now I think an occasional car-load slips in from 



CONNECTICUT 



259 



California. I know that Ventura County in 
southern Cahfornia supphes the baked beans for 
my Sunday morning breakfast. 

Here, then, is the history of the Connecticut 




gETTlLIEIFlS HDW (C®IOf]E(niriI<CinT 
t7i7vi//jfA r/ie Wif/it^iess, and ie^on r7ie setf7e7nen7 ofSarffbni, Thmf 

Valley. And to this valley as early as 1634 such 
men as Hopkins and Haynes and Hooker and 
the first pioneers of Hartford crossed the wil- 
derness of Massachusetts. Three weeks the 



260 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



journey took, which I take when I choose in 
three hours. 

I wish some of that bright set of people that 
they have in Hartford would take time enough in 






. i^ifl 



■ fiEit^it 11 II II II II 




Thk Cai'itol at HaKIKHU). 



winter to write us a good history of their ''littery 
fellers," the circle of wit and learning and men of 
letters who lived in Hartford a hmidred years 
ago. Why should not Professor McCook or Dr. 
Ferguson or dear Mr. Clemens or Arthur Perkins 



CONNECTICUT 



261 



or his sister retire into their inner consciousness 
and go into Miss He wins 's charming inner room 
or rummage in the manuscripts of the alcoves 
of the Wadsworth and tell us more about those 
bright men who wrote such bright things between 




The Death of Captain Ferrer, of the " Amistal*. " 
From a contemporary engraving. 

1790 and 1820? That capital ballad, '^Frankhn 
one night, cold, freezing to the skin," was printed 
in the Hartford Courant of that time. Really, 
it would not be beneath the notice of the Hart- 
ford Courant to unveil to us some of the secrets 
of Connecticut literature a hundred years ago. 
They are always having picturesque things 
turn up in Connecticut. There is not in history 
anything more dramatic than the story of the 



262 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Amistad which worked itself to the denouement 
here. The Amistad was a slave ship. She had 
brought from Afi-ica to Havana a cargo of negroes. 
At Havana some Spanish planter bought the 
cargo, pretty much as it stood, made perhaps 
some additions there, and they were to be carried 
in the Amistad to his plantation. The poor 
fellows had had enough of slave ships, and they 
rose on the Portuguese crew and turned the tables. 
The blacks were in command and the whites were 
the prisoners. Then where were they to go? 
Some divine inspiration, I do not know what, 
bade them steer north. They understood Ameri- 
can politics better than Mr. Van Buren did who 
was the President at that time, and they knew 
that North meant freedom. So they sailed north 
and north and north till a revenue cutter stumbled 
upon them off Long Island and brought them 
into a Connecticut harbor. 

Who says there is no Providence when he 
reads that Connecticut farmers received these 
poor waifs struggling to be free? Well, things 
were not then just what they are now. Mr. 




Roger Sherman Baldwin. 



263 



CONNECTICUT 265 

Van Biiren, a Northern man with Southern 
principles, was President. He hated to bid his 
Connecticut marshal set these people free. He 
did his very best to have them return to Cuba. 
Say what you like to-day about him and his, 
you have to account for that Amistad business 
somehow. But thanks to King Alfred and Runny- 
medc; John Davenport, and Hooker here in Con- 
necticut, we have something which is called 
habeas corpus, and so our Amistad negroes can 
sue out their habeas corpus in a Connecticut court, 
and so Martin Van Buren and the whole Southern 
crew will be put to trial. And Roger Sherman 
Baldwin — a good name for the business — and 
John Quincy Adams, a name as good, had to 
maintain the right of freedom in all the courts. 
And so at last it comes to Washington, and the 
crisis comes before the Supreme Court. Send 
over to the Public Library and get John Quincy 
Adams's diary, which tells the story of that trial. 
Adams had not appeared in court since he was 
a youngster. Now he had the freedom of fifty- 
three men to maintain, and he had a court half of 



266 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



whom had been appointed ])y such men as Van 
Buren and Jackson hked to put into it — South- 
ern men with Southern principles. The morning 
comes of the day of decision, and as John Quincy 

Adams rises from 
his bed they bring 
him a newspaper 
which announces 
to him that the 
night before one 
of the leading 
Southern judges 
has died of ' apo- 
plex}'. In that 
death the balance 
of the court is 
changed, and the 
fifty-three black 
men were set free. Their children are freemen 
to-day in the valley of tlie Congo. Let one of 
my young friends who wants a theme for a trag- 
edy try his hand on this story. 

Do not tell me that what Mrs. Richmond says 




Chakles Goodyear. 




John Quincy Adams. 
From the painting by Edward D. Marchant, 1847, in the New York Historical 

Society. 
267 



CONNECTICUT 269 

of workshops does not admit of poetry or dramatic 
incident. Take such an invention as that of 
Goodyear's india-rubber, born, bred, and per- 




Rogb:r Shkkman, 



fected here in Connecticut. Find somebody 
to tell you the story of the growth of that mustard- 
seed into comfort for the whole earth, so that the 
Norwegian girl who is picking her way across 



270 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



a peat bog at the head of a fjord would bless Mr. 
Goodyear and his wife and his children if she knew 
to whom she owed her dry feet of that morning. 




General Putnam. 
From the painting by Wilkinson. 

Go over to Salisbury and wake up some of the 
memories of the times when they stamped our first 
copper cents, or when Knox bade them cast 
cannon and they did so. They say dear Roger 



CONNECTICUT 



271 



Sherman was a shoemaker. I do not know, but 
I do know that every central suggestion in the 
American Constitution, "the wisest work of 
men's hands that was ever struck off in so short 



^^ 




'^■■1^1^-^ 


r. 


11 


^4iPP^ 


^^*.^ ■:' .. 


'fe.ltMKlllMS 






J^ \ '^ 


K8K:K::-i 


te. 






¥^^.:.: - 


"i- W 




^^^^1 




r^ i 


00ifi .:-i^m 


w^-- .^^^^^m 




T i-'-v^^«iigHiHl 



Gexekal Putnam's Feat at Horse Xeck. 
From ail old engraving. 

a time," is the suggestion of this shoemaker, 
Roger Sherman. 

There is a kind of promptness about these 
people which comes out in the most charming 
way in history. As it happened, and I have 
always been glad of it, I was in the room with 
Grant when somebody told him a story how, six 



272 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



months before Lexington, General Gage seized a 
powder-house of ours in sight of Beacon Hill, and 
how the news ran like wildfire down into Connecti- 
cut, and how, without any order from any Gov- 



■€Mr%ck ,k'^^. i; »,' %k m%i 









7/ 




Putnam's Wolf Den. 

ernor, the freemen of the town in which Grant's 
grandfather lived marched to the relief of Boston, 
and how his grandfather was among them. That 
is the sort of story which you can pick up any 
day in any town, if you will go to the right per- 
son and if you care about the realities of history. 




273 



I 



CONNECTICUT 275 

Take Pomfret and Israel Putnam. What 
boy does not remember the wolf's den ? Pomfret 
is well known now by hundreds of people 
who find it a pleasant summer home, as well as 
by other hundreds who live there. The cave in 
which Israel Putnam killed the wolf is still a 
cave where a wolf could be killed if a man with 
a gun entered behind him. And who is there of 
imaginative turn who will be much distressed 
if it prove that a hundred and fifty years have 
somewhat exaggerated the perils of the position? 

Why one of the early Hales went to Connecticut 
I do not know. All I do know is that in 163-i 
people whose name begins with H — Haynes, 
Hopkins, and Hooker — went over and estab- 
lished Hartford; and now I know that if you 
go to Glastonbury you will be glad to make a 
visit to the great peach plantation of Howard 
Hale, whose peaches one or two hundred thousand 
of my readers have eaten since last June. 

In the Civil War we had in New England a 
little company of men who were, so to speak, the 
''literary bureau" of the time. I could set type 



27G TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

and was son of an editor, so it was my good for- 
tune to sit in their councils, and another person 
who sat in their councils was a man named Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. Well ! pretty much every 
Connecticut man who was worth his salt was 
off with Hawley (observe H again) and the rest 
lugging a musket around Florida or somewhere 
else among our old masters. So the political 
canvass in Connecticut of that summer devolved 
on old gentlemen who were too old to lug muskets. 
And so it was that the literary bureau had its 
part to play, and so it was that Ralph Waldo 
Emerson wrote two little tracts for that canvass. 
One of them is a very good picture of what we gain 
in daily life because there is no custom-house at 
the frontier of every state. Look among your 
old pamphlets, my dear cousins, and find that 
tract without the author's name. It is by the 
"Buddha of the West," the ^'New England Plato." 



CHAPTER VIII 
NEW YORK 

This series of papers began in the counsels 
of Mr. and Mrs. Gentle Reader. As it happens, 
they end in the same counsels. 

At that house they go to bed at 9.30. It was 
now five minutes before nine. He had just been 
reading to her Mr. Hale's paper about Connecti- 
cut in The Outlook. She said, ''The trouble about 
Mr. Hale is that he always supposes that other 
people can do what he does. He has been at the 
top of Katahdin and at the top of Mount Washing- 
ton and at the top of Mansfield and at the top of 
Wachusett. He has been on Ingham Peak in 
Rhode Island and on West Rock in Connecticut, 
and so he writes as if I had been there or as if 
we could go there as easily as we can go to bed." 

''Well/' said Mr. Reader in reply, "I do not see 
why he should not say so. You and I are younger 

277 



278 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



than he is, and we have this very summer before 
us. What do you want to do most?" 

She said that she should forget everjd^hing that 
she had been told about New England, and that 



MAP SHOWING THE 
FKIMIPAL PLACES 

OP 

HISTORICAL INTEREST 

IN 

NEW YORK. 

Scale of Miles. 




she wanted something like what her old school- 
mistress called a '^review." She would like to 
take that review, and at the same time she would 
like to see something in her tarry at home travels 



NEW YORK 



279 



which had not been described or represented 
in The Outlook. 

^'Very good/' said he. ''Mr. Hale begins by 
saying that New England is a peninsula with an 
isthmus not two miles wide at its western point. 




Landing of Hendrik Hudson. 

How should you like to go round by Bar Harbor 
and the end of Nova Scotia, see the Bells at Bad- 
deck, and then go down to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 
and make a call at one of Grenfell's hospitals at 
Newfoundland, take the steamer up to Montreal, 
and then go by rail to St. John's above the Lake; 



280 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

there meet Ransom with our house-boat, and so 
go by the house-boat near Burgoyne's hne to 
Saratoga ? You shall arrive at Saratoga on the 
day of the anniversary of the battle of Bennington. 
I, meanwhile, will have my canoe painted. The 
day you start I will start, and I will go down the 
Connecticut and then paddle along the Sound from 
Saybrook to New York and put the canoe on the 
deck of the steamer which shall take me to Albany. 
Then I will paddle up to Cohoes and make a carry 
at the falls there, and so, on the sixteenth of iVugust, 
I will get on the house-boat and I will find you 
all there. And at the spot where General Gates 
received General Burgoyne's sword, I will fold 
3'ou in my arms and kiss you, and after that you 
will remember that New England is a peninsula 
and that you and I have stood on the neck which 
connects it with the mainland." 

These words were spoken in their bungalow 
near Windsor in Vermont on the Connecticut 
River. 

To all she agreed. Now you must know that 
they were at the omnipotent age. This age is 



NEW YOEK 281 

any age between fourteen and ninety-five, if only 
you be pure of mind, peaceable, and easy to be 
entreated. For then you can use omnipotent 
power if you want to. In this particular case 
these young people had been married twelve 
years. He did not drink, nor smoke, nor play 
at poker or other games of chance. He had no 
yacht, and he disliked the stock market. She 
loved him and her children. Her French and 
German were better than his. They lived in 
the open air every moment when they could 
escape ''those prisons which we call homes." 
So they were always a little beforehand. He was 
always surprised that his bank balance was a 
few hundred dollars better than he thought it 
would be. She was constantly finding that her 
dividends from the Green Consolidated were 
larger than she expected they would be. On 
this occasion they parted from each other for 
nearly three weeks' time — the longest parting 
they had ever known. He told Ransom to have 
the house-boat well scoured out, painted where 
the paint was worn; he gave him the money to 



282 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

buy two mules with, told him he was to have the 
house-boat at Whitehall on the sixth of August. 
She told old Ruah/ who had had charge of the 
children ever since Nathan was born, that she 
was to put the children on the house-boat at 



CoHOES Falls. 

Albany, and that Ransom would take them all 
to St. John's. Then she wrote Gertrude Ingham, 
the same who had been her literature teacher 
at Vassar College, and asked her to make the 
voyage to Nova Scotia, Baddcck, Newfound- 
land, and the St. Lawrence with her. Gertrude 

^ Ruah is short for Lo-ru hamah. 



NEW YOKK 283 

said she would come up to Windsor and join 
her. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Reader had done as he said. 
He had given orders to John Tintoretto, the Italian 
who presided over such things up the river, to 
paint the canoe ; he had sent down to Cocknell's 
for three paddles — one long one and two short 
ones. He had provisioned the canoe for a short 
voyage down the Connecticut River and through 
the Sound, and on the fatal Monday which the 
gods provided, they started on their way. You 
see, when they had this talk of which you have 
heard, at nine o'clock in the evening, it was about 
the time when the days were the longest. Before 
July was well advanced all these preparations 
had been made of which you have been told. 

So she went to White River Junction, and they 
rattled across the country to Portland, with their 
Outlooks in their hands. They refreshed the 
memory of Maine and New Hampshire as well 
as you can from an express train. They went to 
Bar Harbor by the ''Flying Yankee." They did 
not miss one connection at the New Brunswick 



284 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



St, John, or at Halifax, or at Baddeck. At 
Baddeck they saw some of Mr. Bell's wonderful 
kites at Le Bras d'Or, which is the name of thiit 
great shore loch where a bath is so charming. 
By means known to residents of that region, 




Lake Gkokge. 

Tbe Narruws, with Black Mountain and Boltuu, and the Huiumuck iu 

the foreground. 



they went across to the Newfoundland St. John's 
and then by great good luck they joinetl Miss 
Merciful as she was taking round some supplies 
to a hospital in Anticosti. Fortune favors the 
brave, and the Strathcona came along, and carried 



NEW YORK 285 

them from that ship to another on the north 
side of the river, and then there was a Govern- 
ment steamer to go that very afternoon up the 
St. Lawrence to Quebec, and of course it happened 
that Dr. Abernethy was on board, to whom Dr. 
Grenfell had given them a letter. 

When you are at Quebec, everything is easy 
saihng to MontreaL I do not know which of these 
young women is the better traveller. I know 
they always light on their feet. They always 
see whatever there is to be seen, and it does not 
surprise me, therefore, that on the appointed 
day and hour, as old Ransom stood on the front 
of the house-boat, scolding and advising and 
keeping an eye on all the children and instruct- 
ing dear old Ruah on the points where she was 
doubtful, Gertrude and Abra looked out each from 
her own window of the cab which took them from 
the Prince Royal at Whitehall down to the canal. 
Great was the joy, as you may imagine. The 
children had been more than a fortnight parted 
from their mother. Ransom had nothing but 
success to announce. Dear old Ruah, with worthy 



286 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

pride, said she had not had to give anybody any 
medicine, and that they had been good children 
all of them. Abra and Gertrude went round to 
see the mules, patted them and praised them. 
Without so much as turning the boat around, 
the mules were taken round on the tow-path and 
attached to the other end of the boat. The 
cabman was paid, with a shilling extra to buy 
candy for his babies, and before they were ten 
minutes older the reunited party were going 
south on the Champlain Canal, where the children 
had but just now, under Ransom's auspices, been 
travelling to the north. So they found the way 
ready for them, and so the mules, well pleased, 
led them step by step from ''blue Champlain." 
Old Ransom sometimes, when they were coming 
to a lock, let the boy Nathan run along with him 
on the shore, finding wild roses and pond lilies for 
his mother. 

Meanwhile, at Windsor, Mr. Reader had taken 
his own coat-box in his hand out to the express- 
office, had given his instiTictions at the post-office, 
where he found Tintoretto, and walked down 




287 



NEW YORK 289 

to the river, rolled up his duster and tucked it 
under the front seat of the canoe, had bidden 
Timothy good-by, and pulled out into the Con- 
necticut. 

^'1905/' he said to himself; '4t was in 1774 
that John Ledyard floated down here from Dres- 
den College, as he would have called Dartmouth 
College. That was the beginning of the Nile and 
Congo for him." 

And for a little relief he stretched himself out 
in the boat, with one paddle in the water, keeping 
her head to the south if the river flowed south, 
and east when it flowed east, and west when it 
flowed west. There were places where he could 
run in under the shade, but not many such places 
now. There were one or two long reaches where 
he had to paddle if he meant to keep up a good 
average day's work. Sometimes at nightfall he 
padlocked the canoe to a convenient post and 
walked up into the town. He did this at Spring- 
field, and at Hartford. But five times out of 
six he found some trees, where he could roll 
himself in a blanket and let the sun and morning 



290 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



birds waken him. At New York the day boat 
people were glad to take him and the Water 
Witch on board, and as the passengers came down 
he met the Birdsells and the Havilands and the 




Thk Capitol at Aluany. 
From ;i photograph copyrighted by G. P. Hall & Son, N. Y., ISiH). 

Schiiylers and a dozen other of the j^leasantest 
people of the world, and they were earl)^ enough 
to pick out good front chairs on the ii])per deck, 
and so a veiy happy day was provided for. 



NEW YORK 



291 



At Albany he went up to see what was left of 
dear Hunt's picture of Anahita ; he uncovered his 
head reverently before the noble statue of Robert 
Burns; he wondered how that man in the pubhc 




Battle of Saratoga. General Arnold wounded in the 
Attack on the Hessian Redoubt. 



garden makes his lotuses and nymphaeas grow 
so much better than Mr. Reader's do. He called 
on Mrs. McElroy, who told him good news, and an 
hour before nightfall he walked down to the land- 
ing to fuid that the Water Witch was ready for 
him. And then, under the strokes of his own 



292 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

paddle as he worked his way up the river, he should 
arrive (juite on time to see the only house-boat 
on the Champlain Canal and to wave his hand- 
kerchief and to jump on board. 

It is not part of this series of papers to give 
local directions to travellers, which they can 
obtain nmch more to their present point by the 
local guides and the local guide-books. Enough 
to say that he gave Abra the kisses which he had 
promised, that she did not refuse. Enough to 
say that he made the little boy ride with him 
from one of the streams which flows into the 
North River across to one of those which flows 
into Lake Champlain. Nathan is an intelligent 
little fellow who has lived in the open air, and was 
made to understand that this was the isthmus 
of the peninsula of New England. 

They spent a whole day in going over the Bur- 
goyne battle-grounds with a clever local guide, 
who had provided Baroness Riedesel's journal, 
and they read again her pathetic letters. He 
told them the story of the mysterious third Nathan 
Hale and perhaps mythical Nathan Hale. He 



NEW YORK 



293 



made Nathan commit to memory, so that he could 
declaim it to his mother when they came home, 
the lines about the ''great surrender," how the 
Brunswick colors 







Madame Riedesel. 
From a portrait iu her " Memoirs." 

Gayly had circled half the world 
Until they drooped, disgraced and furled, 
That day the Hampshire line 



294 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Stood to its arms at dress parade, 
Beneath the Stars and Stripes arrayed, 

And Massachusetts Pine, 
To see the great atonement made 

By Riedesel and Burgoyne. 

You see he tried to make the boy understand 




General Bukgoyne. 



that the battles at Saratoga are among Colonel 
Creasy 's "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World." 
The reader may go back in these papers to see 



NEW YORK 



295 



what is said about this in the chapter on Ver- 
mont. Nathan, who understands a map, pointed 
out to him that the battles of Bennington were 
fought on the New York side of the Vermont 
hne. 

Possibly some enthusiastic German-American 




Conscription of German Soldikrs fur Service in America. 

will write me a line to sa)^ just what the Bmns- 
wick colors and the Hessian colors were which 
were ''furled" at Saratoga. We want replicas of 
those colors badly in the Old South Meeting-House 
in Boston, which is our museum of such things. 



296 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

But somehow no one in Frankfurt seems eager 
to send them to us. 

(In a parenthesis let me ask if you happen to 
know how the Rothschild fortune began. It 
was when one Napoleon was driving the Elector 
of Hesse out of his palace, and the Elector had 
some ready money by him. He found a young 
Jewish banker and placed his money in his hands 
at a very low rate of interest. It happened that 
the Jewish banker had no opportunity to return 
it till the Elector came back after a good many 
years, and on the profits on that silver money 
the Rothschild fortunes were already well begun. 
Now, if you please, that silver money which the 
Elector had in hand was the identical store of 
shillings and half-crowns which one George III. 
had paid this gentleman for the troops who were 
killed at Red Bank, who surrendered at Benning- 
ton and again at Saratoga, and who spent the rest 
of the war as prisoners of war in Virginia. Per- 
haps the House of Rothschild some day will be 
grateful enough for this acorn from which grew 
a great tree, to endow a university for the study 



NEW YORK 



297 



of the metaphysics of war, in one of the Old Thir- 
teen States. Saratoga would be a good place 
for it. There could be a long vacation in July and 



' 1... ■ /> ^' V ,^ t. 




Burgoyne's Army on thk Road from Lake Champlain to 
Fort Edward. 



August, when visitors could reside in the college 
dormitories.) 

No American will go to see the battle-grounds 



298 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



of Saratoga or the place of the capitulation made 
by Burgoyne without remembering that, a hundred 
years after, a great American soldier died at 
Mount McGregor. Yes, and if any one wants 
to spend more time than our young friends did, 



ri^ 


\ 

i 








i 

■ 


■1:^; 


*•■ "■ '° '•■'' • ■''• >; j:. 




,„ ^ , *. * > : • 




■•'' ;. .■" . , •^.' ' 



General Grant's Cottage at Mount McGregor. 

here is the McGregor House, and hard ])y is 
Saratoga Springs, and not far away is Ballston. 

I wish we could make room and had a right to 
print here the diary of Miss Edes, a pretty Boston 
girl who came to Ballston about a century ago 



NEW YORK 



299 



with a great-uncle or somebody who was good to 
her; and she danced and perhaps joined in the 
flirtations of the infant watering-place. Recol- 
lect that ''Ballston Spa" was a fashionable water- 
ing-place before Saratoga was. Ballston Spa, 




Ballston Spa in its Fashionablk Days (about 1835). 

I think, is still the county seat. Not to go into 
geology or paleontology, for the present is more 
than we can handle, it will be enough to say that 
the different wells and springs both at Ballston 
and Saratoga to-day are what one may properly 
call bilge water of the early world. Fortunately 



300 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



for us of this time, the waters of that day settled 
in some sort of imdergi'ound lake at the bottom, 
and so we are able now to drink water like what 
the megalosaurus or the Carnegiesaurus and other 
creatures of those early formations drank. People 




ViKW OF Sakatoca just bkfouk the Middle of the Last 
Century. 

who are old-fashioned enough to read the ''Last 
of the Mohicans" and the ''Pioneers" will find 
some nice allusions which Cooper made to the 
early outpour of the springs. 

But Mr. and Mrs. Reader and the children had 
not time to study the geology or paleontology 



NEW YORK 301 

while they were in that region, and a day more 
saw them in their comfortable home, the house- 
boat, on their way to Niagara. They were quite 
careless whether the journey should last fifteen 
days or five-and-twenty days. In the open 
air, with God's sky overhead and all the time there 
is, and the good long days of August, and their 
own good company, with cardinal-flowers and 
pond-hlies, not to say an occasional sacred bean 
or water-chinquapin, there was enough to make 
a good large life of it, even if they did not pick 
up the morning newspaper. 

Nine out of ten of the readers of these lines 
have no acquaintance with the house-boat but 
that which they got from Mr. Black's charming 
story of such a journey as this in England. But 
there are still left in America some of our old 
canals of the last century, where one can get 
away from cinders and smoke and dust, and have 
the comforts of his home and the joys of open- 
air life very closely knit in with each other. One 
of the very best of such opportunities is that given 
on the Erie Canal. 



302 TAREY AT HOME TRAVELS 

I have done my level best in the last few years 
to place the name of De Witt Clinton among 
the names of the American heroes in the New 




De Witt Clinton. 



York University. I am sorry to say that the 
New Yorkers themselves hardly seem to be aware 
that there was such a man ; but all the same there 
was. De Witt Clinton, of the great house of 



NEW YORK 303 

Clinton, one of the two great houses that fought 
each other in the early politics of the state of 
New York, was the leader of what was the Demo- 
cratic party, which queerly enough in those days 
was called the Republican party. In 1801 he 
became senator of the United States. He left 
the Senate to be mayor of the city of New York, 
was removed and reappointed in 1811, and con- 
tinued mayor till 1815. He took up early in 
life the policy of canal construction between the 
Hudson and Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. 
In 1817 a bill was passed authorizing the work 
at the expense of the State. In the same year 
he was chosen Governor, and in 1825 he had the 
"felicity of being borne from Buffalo to Albany in 
a barge, on the great work with which his name 
is identified." 

With the construction of the Erie Canal the 
rapid development of the states then called the 
Northwestern states, which are now the great 
Middle states of the country, became possible. 
The success of that canal was an incentive in 
every American state to what used to be called 



304 



TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 



"internal improvement." For those reasons I 
should have been glad if the honor, for it is an 
honor, of a place among the heroes of America 
in the Hall of Fame could have been awarded to 
De Witt Clinton. 

The valley of the Mohawk gives a line so con- 
venient that the suggestion of a canal w^as made 




Route of the Ekik Canal. 

very early. There is a story, undoubtedly au- 
thentic, of Washington, who knew from his boy- 
hood the lake country to the west, predicting a 
canal here soon after the establishment of the Con- 
stitution. An attentive correspondent tells me 
that Washington invested money in the Mohawk 
Valley and that many farms near Little Falls 
are held under deeds from him. Between the 












111 





^' h * "<^/ «.■ ' ,1-. -n , 




I' Vilify rvi*i..i 








G05 



NEW YORK 307 

Hudson River and the Lakes the highest summit 
which is surmounted by the lockage of the canal 
is 688 feet above the sea. The height of Lake 
Erie above the Hudson is 568 feet. The flow of 
the water eastward is calculated, I think, on a 









k M 




r^^^J/ 


Hl^i 


^sIKsiih^ 


M 






1 



View of the Erie Canal, at the Little Falls, Mohawk River. 
From an engraving published in Loudon in 1831. 

plan of a moderate descent of half an inch in a 
mile. I believe the engineers to this hour think 
that the original construction reflected great honor 
on those self-taught engineers who were engaged 
in that work. They managed to build it for 
seven million dollars — an investment which 



308 



TARIIY AT HOME TRAVELS 



has been repaid to the state again and again 
and yet again by the wealth, not to be calculated, 
which has made the city of New York what it is 
and the state of New York what it is. 

Of course the cargoes which move from the 
West to the East on the canal-boats are much 




Erie Canal, Lockport. 
From an early engraving. 

more bulky than those which pass from the East 
to the West. A dollar's worth of gi'ain takes 
mucli moi'e room and weighs more than a dollar's 
worth of jackknives. Of course, also, it takes 
longer for a Ijarge-load of gi'ain to float from 




309 



NEW YORK 311 

Biiffiilo to Albany under the propulsion of some 
meditative mules than a car-load on a railway 
which travels by night as well as by day, with 
one of the giants of modern times leading the 
train. All the same, the transfer of the food 
of the West to the breakfast-tables of the East 
by the canal is very cheap, and the canal holds 
its own in face of railway competition. So you 
and I, dear Reader, if we live in a seaport, ought 
to be thankful for it, that it settles for us a good 
many of the questions as to the cost of freight. 

This is certain, that whoever prays for his 
daily bread in the morning owes a good deal to 
De Witt Clinton and his followers, as the years 
go by. In December, 1815, a barrel of flour of 
the best brand cost anybody in Boston nine 
dollars. The best flour he can buy now costs 
five dollars and twenty-five cents. We owe the 
difference to the Erie Canal. One goes nowa- 
days from Albany to Buffalo at the rate of fifty 
or sixty miles an hour. When the passenger 
service was well organized on the Erie Canal, 
the passenger boats went by day and night, and 



312 



TAEEY AT HOME TRAVELS 



achieved eighty-five miles in twent3'^-four hours, 
on an average. But the traveller of to-day does 
not begin with Cohoes Falls. He does not see 
where Sam Patch made his celebrated leap, he 

certainly does 
not gather the 
sacred bean of 
India, nor does 
his little boy 
run along on 
the tow-path, 
and, if he cap- 
ture a frog 
small enough, 
jump on board 
the boat with 
it and make 
Dr. emphalet nott. mamma put 

it in her thimble. Such are the joys of such trav- 
ellers as Mr. and Mrs. Gentle Reader. They do 
not, however, make eighty-five miles in the 
twenty-four hours, nor do they pretend to. 
Dear Innocents, they had all the time there is. 




Red Jacket, Sauovkwatha. 
From the painting by Robert W. Weir. 
313 



NEW YORK 315 

This is the phrase which Red Jacket used and 
which Mr. Emerson used to quote with so much 
humor. If anybody wants to know who Red 
Jacket was, he was an Iroquois Chief on the hne 
of this same canal. And if anybody wants to 
know when he was, let him go ask my dear sister 
Julia Ward Howe, who told me that when she 
was six years old her mother introduced her to 
Red Jacket in his home. No, no, no ! Abra and 
her husband were in no hurry, the children were 
in no hurry, nor were the mules in any hurry. 
From time to time old Ransom affected to be in 
a hurry, but really he was not in a hurry. I am 
painfully aware that this reader will not follow 
their example, but let us hope that he is not in 
such a hurry that he must cross the state in five 
hours, must ''do" Niagara in five more, and 
must return to his brownstone house in New 
York by a night train. 

Schenectady? Yes, of course they stopped in 
Schenectady. They had many pleasant people 
to see in Schenectady, they had to hear the tradi- 
tions of Dr. Nott. It was vacation time, so that 



316 TARRY AT HOIVIE TRAVELS 

they could not see all the pleasant people, but 




they could refresh themselves on the historical 
centres. They shed the right number of tears 



NEW YORK 319 

over the grave of Miss McCrea ; they saw the Glen 
House or the Saunders House. Reader called it 
the Glen House and Abra called it the Saunders 
House. Here are their notes on Schenectady: — 

''Have you not read up al30ut the Schenectady 
massacre? It is high time you did. At all 
events, you will like to go down to the Saunders 
house, which stands as a •sort of memorial to 
that massacre, although the house which now 
stands was built afterwards. This is the family 
of the Glen. Perhaps you do not know that 
Saunders and Glen are the same word. This 
family of the Glen, I say, were always good 
to the Indians. They always had something 
to eat for the Indian tramp, and they never 
fooled him by giving him water too hot to 
wash his hands with. They were nice to him. 
What happened then, when the massacre took 
place, was that the Glen family or the Saunders 
family — have it as you like, though nobody 
called them Saunders then — were spared, and 
their house, too, was not destroyed. 

''Now, if any student of the higher criticism 



320 



TAliRY AT HOME TKAVELS 



^wants to know why Saunders are sometimes 
Glens and Glens are sometimes Saunders, 'let 
him read/ as Mr. Browning says. Some of these 
people went down to Louisiana, and one of them, 
being named Alexander Saunders, used to be 




Glens Falls. 

From a photograph, ropyrijjhted, 185)0, by S. R. Stoddard, 

Glens Falls, N.Y. 

called Sandy and Sanderson there, and was then 
called Saunders of the Glen. WTien his children 
and his children's children grew up and came 
l)ack to Schenectady, some of them thought 
they were Saunders and some of them thought 
they were Glens, and they chose their names 
accordingly. 



NEW YORK 321 

"It was exactly as Lafayette had six names 
he could call upon, and if he did not want to be 
Lafayette he could be Motier. But you can find 
the Saunders House if you want the Saunders 
House. If you want memorials of the Glen, you 
can go over to Glens Falls." 

There are most charming bits of family history, 
Cavalier and Puritan, which the Saunders-Glen 
people of to-day have preserved. Central is 
the interesting story of the way in which the 
Saunders house was protected when the rest of 
Schenectady was swept by the barbarians. 

As you go west as the Readers went, or on 
either of the railways, you can see the pretty 
''chutes" where the Indians said the sun rolled 
down as he was approaching his setting. For 
the benefit of the New York Observer, I will say 
that in literal fact the sun does not roll down this 
mountain side; but there are periods of the year 
near the month of June — trust me who have 
seen it — when the sun hugs the mountain range 
curiously close, and to the savages, who had not 
studied with Flamsteed, Langley, or Pickering, 



322 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



it did appear to roll down on that toboggan 
slide. 

But it would never do to try to tell what they 
saw, nor will The Outlook care to publish their 
journal from one end to the other. One thing 
Mr. Gentle Reader learned which he had not 
learned before, though I had often told it to him 




Salt Manufacture at Syracuse. 

1. Solar Evaporation or Salt Fields. 3. Interior of Salt Hlocks or Boilinj; Works. 

2. Exterior of Salt Blocks. 4. State Puiiip House and Keservoir. 

— he learned how this countiy is governed by its 
small cities and its large towns. He learned that 
in such places as Schenectady and Utica and 
Syracuse and Batavia and Rochester and Le 
Roy and Buffalo and a hundred others, the public 



NEW YORK 323 

opinion of the town is generally sound and strong, 
and that dawned upon him which I had not been 
able to impress upon him in talking — that a 
great city like New York or Philadelphia or Chi- 
cago or Boston has no such control over the real 
policy of the country as have, in the aggregate, 
such towns as Akron and Goshen and New Padua 
and Runnymede, which make the public opinion 
of Us the People. A man learns this lesson very- 
well as he goes from one end of the state of New 
York to the other. In the Vermont chapter 
I spoke of a speech I made in the city of New 
York at a great Alpha Delta Phi convention. 
In that speech I called attention to the fact that 
a member of the lower house in Albany represents 
about as many people as a member of the English 
Parliament represents. Someboch" in the audi- 
ence laughed. I said: ''I am sorry that any 
person laughs. The three persons whom I recol- 
lect as members of the legislature of New York 
w^ould certainly have done honor to any parlia- 
mentary assembly in any nation in any period 
of history since parliamentary institutions took 



324 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

on their present form." The three people whom 
I had in mind when I spoke were Andrew Dixon 
A^liite of Syracuse, Carleton Sprague of Buffalo, 
and Theodore Roosevelt of New York City. 
I think that twenty years have justified what I 




'^ i//^ I-l^ itfjuhi J77.9- i;™.\\^ie wit/i a />cdy ef\fnieni-im trm^'s wi/A 7/»7^a- 
tied musiflf scai-c/ tfuloit at midn>j^/(t anti^^ tAf ^arristn feocnrnijftruonfn. 

said of those three men. And I am apt to re- 
member this speech of mine and these men when 
I read in a New Yoi'k oi" Boston newspaper about 
hayseed legislation, witli the implication that 
nobody knows anything unless he lives in the 
particular town in which the newspaper is printed. 



NEW YORK 325 

When you go by canal or by the railway, you 
have a chance to see the oldest work of God 
which you will ever see on this planet, which I 
have referred to already in our first number. 
According to Agassiz and Ihe other men who 
know, when this world passed into the Paleozoic 
out of the Eozoic condition — that is, when it 
passed from the dawn of life to the antiquity of 
life — certain red-hot rocks showed above the 
water, with much steam, I fancy, and much 
hissing. They were the range of ancient rock 
which divides the waters of the St. Lawrence 
from the waters of New England and New York. 
The railway as it runs west from Schenectady 
takes its course through this red rock, and 
Mr. and Mrs. Gentle Reader and the children 
saw it as the mules travelled along on the path- 
way of the canal. At Little Falls the boys 
rushed out to sell them diamonds. These are 
not of the brand of Golconda or Johannesburg, 
but they are cheaper, and the children were well 
pleased to begin their mineralogical cabinet with 
them. 



326 TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

No ! I will not pretend to tell of the various 
adventures of those happy ten days. I will not 
tell of messengers up to cheerful-looking houses 
and the return of milk and cream and eggs for 
the support of man and woman. Then at such 
places as Ilion or Utica or Rome or Rochester, 
there would be a walk or a drive through the 
neighborhood, with every adventure ranging 
from the simplicity of a canal ride up to the 
highest civilization. 

With the nice hearty inmates of other boats 
Reader and his wife and the children made cordial 
acquaintances, some of which will ripen into the 
friendships of half a century. For you must 
please to understand, dear reader, that the sailor, 
whom I must not call a seaman, who commands 
a vessel of three or four hundred tons which 
makes regular passages backward and forward 
from New York to Buffalo and perhaps farther 
west, lives on his craft with his family. The 
boat is their home. Nahum learns from his 
mother there that b-a-t spells bat, and Tiyphena 
learns there how to broil a steak and how to bake 



NEW YORK 327 

a potato. If there were a long line of locks to- 
gether, with so much of business as to keep the 
travellers half a day, our children played marbles 
with other boys of the fleet, or perhaps the girls 
from the rest of the fleet came aboard the house- 
boat and played checkers or backgammon.. 

Are you, alas ! as fortunate as they in your 
vehicle? I am afraid you are riding at sixty 
miles an hour as you turn this leaf rather impa- 
tiently. But all the same there are one or two 
points which you should notice. Keep on the 
watch after you pass Schenectady if you are on 
the northern of the two' parallel roads. Even 
to a flying traveller those black and red rocks 
seem more hard and cruel than most rocks do, 
and well they may. 

They were what Charles Sprague saw, — 

'^ When the young sun revealed the glorious scene 
Where oceans gather 
And where fields grow green." 

Certainly I do not know, and I do not think 
that anybody else knows, how long it was after 
the sudden uprising of these silent rocks before 



328 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the ice-waves from the north, bringing down 
icy floes and glaciers even, came southward in 
their flow, lodged for a trifle of a few hundred 
thousand centuries (be the same more or less) 
on the north side of the Laurentian Range, and 
then surmounted it and all other such trifles, and 
passed southward till they melted away before 
summer suns. You and I need not bother 
ourselves about the length of time. ^Vliat men 
know is that these waters which filled the Lake 
Ontario of that time, the ancestors of the waves 
which now go down the St. Lawrence so peace- 
fully, were barred by the piles of icebergs in 
their way, and that they swept across to find the 
sea by way of the Hudson River. Men know 
their track by the boulders, and gravel-sheets, 
and bits of sand which they have left behind 
them. 

Wlien it was last proposed to enlarge the great 
Erie Canal, there were people who thought that 
this old tideway of the very dawn of things might 
be cleared from its rubbish and made to do our 
great business of daily bread. If you want to 



NEW YORK 



329 



follow out this little bit of prehistoric annals, 
cross from Utica or Syracuse to Lake Ontario and 
find some of those intelligent gentlemen there 
who will give a happy month to you to show the 
course by which that unnamed river found its 
way to Manhattan and the sea. 

Or, if you have not the month to give to this, 




NiAcAKA Falls. 



go down the bay between Staten Island and 
Long Island with some intelligent pilot, and he 
will tell you where is the deep gorge which those 
old icebergs chiselled out as they worked their way 
to the Atlantic. 

Do not pretend to make your first or your fiftieth 
visit to Niagara without possessing and studying 
the directions to travellers prepared in 1903 by 
the Commission for the Preservation of Niagara. 



330 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

In this very interesting report you will learn much 
that the average sightseer misses; you will learn 
things which nobody Imew thirty years ago. 
One or more days may be spent to great advan- 
tage in following the Niagara by trolley, cross- 
ing it at its mouth at Kingston, and returning 
on the other side. Stop over at the station, 
where a veiy clever fellow (Yankee clever) will 
take you down into the gorge where Tom Moore 
thought how nice it would be 

'* By the side of yon sumach whose red berry dips 
In the foam of this streamlet, how sweet to recline, 
And to know that 1 sighed upon innocent lips 
Which had never been sighed on by any but mine." 

This is as good place as any to say that in any 
collected edition of Moore's poems the Gentle 
Reader will find a curious series of ''Poems Relat- 
ing to America." When Moore left Bermuda, 
''on account of a disorder in the chest," he landed 
at New York, and by what he called the "Cohos" 
came to Niagara, and so went down Lake Ontario 
and the St. Lawrence to Montreal, and Halifax, 
when he sailed in the frigate Boston for New York. 



NEW YORK 



331 



The poem from which I quoted four lines above 
is a veiy curious monument of the America of 




Fanny Kemisle. 



that time. I suppose the Boston, which was an 
Enghsh frigate and not an American frigate, was 



332 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the same Boston which the poor state of Massa- 
chusetts had lost to the Enghsh in the Penobscot 
in 1778. 

It is quite woi'th while for any one who has a 
spark of historical interest to take with liini on 
his house-boat, as he goes from Albany to Buffalo, 
the journal kept by the girl Fanny Kemble, as 
she went to the " Falls" for the first time. The 
journal ends at her first view of Niagara, ''0 
God! who can describe that sight!!!" 

There the reader can see how before the days 
of syndicates men travelled by rail. There was 
a superstition first th[it you had to have an 
inclined plane by which to ascend to a town or 
another by which you went out of it, as you 
ascended from Albany by an inclined plane. 
There was another superstition that when you 
arrived at a town }'ou must leave the train and 
ride across in a different carriage (technically 
called a hack) to another railroad. Perhaps 
you went from Albany to Schenectady on one, 
from Schenectady to Utica on another, from 
Utica to Syracuse on another, from Syracuse to 



NEW YORK 333 

Rochester on another, and from Rochester to 
Buffalo on another. One must not say it even 
in a whisper, but it required syndicates to unite 
these four or five roads into one. 

If you will carefully read the Commissioners' 
direction for visiting Niagara, you will learn 
about the discussions which have gone on since 
Lyell's tim.e, and even before, as to the place of 
the cataract in different ages, as to the different 
courses by which the waters from the upper 
lakes pass down through Ontario to the sea. It 
really seems probable that there was a time when 
the northern part of Lake Huron discharged itself 
to the sea by a much shorter channel. 

Ah me ! I have only brought our adventurous 
family to the western line of the state, and all 
southern New York is as yet in the inkstand. 

The Outlook is so generous that it permits me 
to give my little boom to the Erie Canal, which 
sometimes seems to need a little cordial friend- 
ship in its various trials. But we cannot take 
the happy family back by the same route, for 



334 



TAHRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



fear that they should be frozen up on the long 
level east of Rochester. The reader may take 
any route he chooses. There is the Erie Railway 
for instance. 
. Recollect, in general, Gentle Reader, that 




Chautauqua Lake and Point. 

New York is the Empire State because it holds 
this central place between the oldest mountains 
in the world and the latest Paris fashions as 
exhibited in New York stores. When you are 
by Chautauqua Lake, it is a toss of a sixpence 



NEW YORK 335 

whether your cigar end, when you throw it into 
a brook as you drive, shall go down the Mississippi 
and enlarge Florida, or shall go down the St. 
Lawrence, and feed the dun fish of your next 
winter's Sunday morning breakfast. Let me 
say in passing that if you have not spent a week 
at the annual Chautauqua you do not know your 
own country. There and in no other place known 
to me do you meet Baddeck and Newfoundland 
and Florida and Tiajuana at the same table; 
and there you are of one heart and one soul with 
the forty thousand people who will drift in and 
out there — people all of them who believe in 
God and in their country. 

Farther east, whether you are on foot, as I 
hope you are, or are travelling in Mrs. Diederich 
Stuyvesant's automobile, as I hope you are not, 
you will be tempted by each of the Five Finger 
Lakes, as the geologists call them. 

Here lived in happier days the ^'Five Nations," 
who became six nations. The Senecas, Onon- 
dagas, Mohawks, Cayugas, and Oneidas, to whom 
in after times were added the Tuscaroras. Here 



336 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



Jemima Wilkinson settled among them, and 
introduced peaceful arts. Oh, that The Outlook 
would give me two numbers to tell who Jemima 
Wilkinson was, who is known to only one of the 
three million readers of this page. 

If by accident any one wants to know how the 




Falls of Genesee River, at Ruchester. 

Five Nations grew up to be one of the gardens of 
the world, let him read the new life of Jan Huide- 
koper. He will see here how a young Dutch- 
man, landing when he was twenty years old with 
twenty dollars in his pocket, lived for six or seven 
decades and died in his own palace in Crawford 



NEW YOEK 337 

County in Pennsylvania, caring in the meantime 
for the Holland Purchase and for other like regions. 
The biography of one man serves you for a study 
of the history of a nation. 

Rochester? Pray let us stay in Rochester 
for a day or two, if only to see the beauty of the 
fruit in August or September or October. Do 
you know that the Rochester Bank, which was 
the Flour Bank when Rochester flour was the 
.best flour in the world, is now the Flower Bank, 
because the Rochester nurseries and gardens 
challenge the comparison of the world? 

Syracuse? We must stop over here if it were 
only to see Mr. Calthrop and to go out to the 
model village where they make ready for market 
the alkalies which are far older than our Lauren- 
tian hills. 

Utica? We shall have bad luck if we do not 
strike a convention there. And we must spend 
three or four years at Ithaca with Mr. White and 
President Schurman, and talk Browning with 
Professor Corson. We used to say of Ithaca 
that there were only young professors there, that 



338 



TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



they had their reputations to make and were 
making them. Now that they have made them, 
it is worth while to recollect that prophecy. 
Among all these great names, which appear 

in every newspaper, I 
should like to remind 
the reader, who is very 
gentle, of what he 
never heard of, and 
that is Schoharie Cave. 
Back from the Cats- 
kills, back from Sche- 
nectady, back from 
Sharon, back from 
everywhere. It is one 
of those curious lime- 
stone caves in which 
the electric light now 
shows such wonders. 
And without going to the Mammoth Cave you 
may see here the underground wonders of the 
world. 

Sharon and Richfield and Saratoga and Ballston 




Jacob Gould Schuuman. 
President of Coinell. 



NEW YOEK 



339 



and forty other watering-places all offer you their 
temptations. 

The people of New York City themselves do not 
know the wonders of their systems of parks. 
I am sure I did not know them till a traveller 




The Mall, Central Park. 

from London, from the Park Commission there, 
told me how much time it had taken him to 
examine them, and gave me a hint of how much 
was before me when I had a month or two for 
the examination. 



340 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Fossils ? Yes, fossils if you want them. Lions ? 
Yos, lions if you want them. Here is the very 
lion which the little Carnegie girl saw in his cage 
somewhere on the Rhine and asked her father 
to send to New York. A great English botanist 
once told me that I could study palm-trees better 
in the great palm houses at Kew than if I were 
in Java or Malacca. I am quite sure that I 
know more of the habits of the hippopotamus 
from my observations in the Central Park than 
do all my bragging travelled friends who have 
been up the Nile and down half a dozen times. 

The Outlook reader will be on the outlook as 
he tarries at home in his travels for something, 
be the same more or less, which will show him 
how man is to be lifted to the higher plane and 
come nearer to the good God. He will do well, 
then, if he take the Outlook office as a central 
point, and if, l)y the arts of a genial nature and 
the simple life, he connnunicate with the officers 
of the Associated Charities in the same building, 
he may learn from them more and more of the 
marvellous charity systems of the city and state. 



NEW YORK 343 

Do not let Argus-eyed Press deceive you here. 
Argus-eyed Press has a knack of seeing the worst 
and making the most of it. If John Flaherty 
knock out his wife's brains with a flatiron, John 
Flaherty will l^e the hero of the next nine days. 
Meanwhile, hour by hour or day by day, week 
after week, assiduous, tender, Christian charity 
is working its way up hill and down dale in the 
great city and in the great state. At the office 
of the Associated Charities they will show the 
Gentle Reader how and where to learn what he 
wants to know of the care which men and women 
can give to men or women who are in trouble. 

And in the organization of public education by 
steady steps, still advancing, the Empire State 
of New York has learned what it has to teach to 
the rest of the civilized states. Here at my side 
I have the last reports of the University of the 
State of New York — the One Hundred and Seven- 
teenth Annual Report and the One Hundred 
and Eighteenth Annual Report. ^Vhat is called 
the University of the City of New York is wholly 
different from that of the University of the State 



344 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



of New York. In the year 1784 the corporation 
of the Regents of the University of the State of 
New York was formed by the infant legislature. 
It is now a state department and at the same 
time a federation of more than nineteen hundred 
institutions of '^ secondary" and higher educa- 




CuNKSTOCiA W'AfiON. 



tion. Its field includes high schools, union free 
schools, academies, colleges, universities, profes- 
sional and technical schools, and also the work 
of education connected with the Ubraries, study 
clubs, and extension courses. 

To speak of one detail of the supervision which 
this Board exercises over the higher studies, or 



NEW YORK 345 

home education department, the library depart- 
ment has been a model to the nation. It is 
difficult to make people understand that by the 
lending library system of the state of New York 
there are now in that state five hundred and 
twenty-one libraries, with two million three hun- 
dred thousand books, circulating annually on an 
average four hundred issues to each hundred 
families. The state established a library school 
which has attained a national reputation. The 
state Library ranks as second in the country in 
its equipment. 

And so. Gentle Reader, we must part. We 
have travelled through seven states, and yet we 
have tarried at home. I did not know you by 
sight when we began, I do not loiow you by sight 
now. But then we were strangers to each other. 
Now I have that feeling of gratitude to you which 
none but he who feels it knows — none but a 
writer. He is used to readers who lay his valuable 
tractates down to be read on the next Sunday, 
and then to be forgotten with the dust of three 
days upon them. You have not treated me thus. 



346 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



If you did, these words would be as blank paper 
to you. 

Seven states we have gone through. They 
are states which have made their place in the 
civilization of the world and need not be afraid 

of their future. 
When in 1750 
dear Ezra 
Stiles, who was 
quite compe- 
tent to this 
d u t y, a p- 
proached the 
history of one 
hundred and 
thirty years of 
New England, 
he ventured to 
prophesy. He had found out how often the 
population of New England doubled; he sup- 
posed that it would double three or four times at 
the same rate before another century ended in 
1850. He was sure that the religion of the Con- 




EzRA Stiles. 



NEW YORK 



347 



gregational churches was the best in the world. 
He was sure that the stuff of which Connecticut 
and Massachusetts were made was the best in the 
world, and he calculated, therefore, that in 1850 
six or seven million of us would be hving in the 




Emigration to the' Western Country. 

four New England colonies of his day, — well, let 
us own it, — that this confederated little nation 
would be as well advanced in the world as any 
of the old Englands or Hollands or France or 
Spain. He did not conceive it possible that any 
man in his senses would ever move west of the 



348 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Hudson River to live. Dear Ezra Stiles, I am 
afraid that he never pardoned his friend Frank- 
lin for establishing himself in Philadelphia. 

It has not turned out just as Ezra Stiles meant 
it should, but when I go to Tiajuana, and when 
I spend a Sunday in Vienna, and when I take 
my coffee in the arbor in the Alhambra, and I 
run against a compatriot who has one of the New 
England names or those of their New York cousins, 
I am apt to find that he is glad to tell me that his 
forbears eight or nine generations ago came over 
with Brewster or Winthrop or Davenport or the 
Scotch-Irish or Knickerbocker or Stuyvesant. 
I do not find that those who come from the Empire 
State are ashamed of the Empire State, and I do 
find that those who have kinsmen in New Eng- 
land are glad that they have kinsmen there. 

It lias been a pleasure. Gentle Reader, to feel 
the touch of your lumd and to wonder if one of 
your one hundred and twenty-eight ancestors 
who arrived in 1630 were, possibly, one of mine. 



CHAPTER IX 
WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 

Writing in the city of Washington, which I 
first visited in 1844, I hke to give some memories 
of that city, which I think I must have visited 
sixty-one different times since, before 1905. 

The centennial of the city was observed with 
distinguished ceremonies by Congress in the year 
1900. Mrs. President Adams's first drawing- 
room was New Year's Day, 1801. In a few words 
the history of the city's birth is this : By an act 
of 1790, the first Congress under the Constitution 
empowered the President to select a site for a 
'^federal city" on the Potomac River. The 
''vote" was a very narrow one. The question of 
the site of the city had been the first geographical 
question which divided the national Congress. 
In the year 1861, when I paid one of my last 
visits to Josiah Quincy, he spoke of those debates 

349 



350 



TAKKY AT HOME TRAVELS 



and of the end of them by a vote of the Senate 
with the utmost bitterness. I had asked him, 
I think, when the North and South first measured 
swords. Wlien he rephed, I felt that he had a 
sort of contempt for my ignorance. He said it 

was on the question 
whether the federal 
city should be north 
or south of Mason 
and Dixon's line — 
that is, whether it 
should be in North- 
ern or Southern ter- 
litoiy. The balance 
between the twelve 
states was so even 
that the vote for a 
Southern federal 
city was gained only by the secession of a New 
Hampshire Senator, of whom Mr. Quincy spoke 
with the most bitter contempt, as if his vote had 
been treasonable. But the vote as given was 
given to the bank of the Potomac River, and 




President Washington. 





LLtr 
LUL- 
LLLIL 
LLU.L .. _. 

LLLLLLXLM' 






t.L.U I- \.H_L_1_ \ L. -jjL. t_ (-<_ i_ t ■" 






^i- y-<-'-i-^i-l-^l .LLi.l.i '.<.Ll.i_ .1....^.* "1 ;' 




'iLULLL.LLL.iL. KC , 

f *l-^l-l_l_H.w LLC LlT-,,,,;! 
^ LLLS.L.LLl_ LUL L". .1"'',, 

^LL.LL^*I2,_L.L.LL UL LL,..V 
' ^l-U,,'^:'; 1-\1_1_U.CL /LLLLM U.r , 

^'-'-l-l_l_C,'_l.L-Ll -I I 





>. w ! 



>( 



351 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 353 

George Washington was directed to select the 
location. 

In 1864, when I was on a visit to General 
Benjamin F. Butler at Fort Monroe, he called 
my attention to the rather curious fact that the 
site which Washington selected was the place 
where Daniel Defoe seventy-eight years before 
had put his hero Colonel Jack when he came to 
America as a white '' apprentice." Colonel Jack, 
as this reader should know, was an English boy 
who had been kidnapped, as was the fashion in 
the time of Queen Anne and George the First, 
and so sent into the white slavery of Virginia. 
The history of Colonel Jack is to this hour the best 
narrative we have of the life of that class of men, 
the white slaves of Virginia at the end of the seven- 
teenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. 
The book is worth reading to-day because it con- 
tains Defoe's views of African slavery, and what 
ought to happen about it. And it is, I think, 
generally forgotten that the greatest hero of 
American literature, if we except Uncle Tom, 
is that man described by Defoe as being a 

2a 



354 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Brazilian slave-owner who was engaged in the 
slave trade when he was shipwrecked on an island 
at the mouth of the Orinoco. This slave-owner 
and slaveholder was Robinson Crusoe. In his 
memoirs, which have been more widely circu- 
lated than any book that was ever written ex- 
cepting the Bible, there is never one expression 
of regret that he had engaged in the slave trade, 
or of reproof of the institution of slavery. But 
in Colonel Jack, Defoe does express himself as 
if it were desirable that that institution should 
come to an end. 

It is interesting now to remember that a niece 
of his, named Elizabeth, left her friends in 
London and embarked for America. She was 
without friends and bargained with the captain 
of the ship to be sold on her arrival to reim- 
burse the captain for her passage. Accordingly, 
that year, she was offered for sale in Philadelphia, 
and Andrew Job of Cecil County bought her 
for a term of years and brought hei' to his 
home. Such was the custom of that time. She 
not infrequently received letters from her uncle, 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 



355 



Daniel Defoe. From this lady came the distin- 
guished family of Trimble, now resident, I think, 
in Maryland. 

It requires a little vigor of the imagination to 
divine precisely the place of Colonel Jack's home. 
But he says him- 
self, ''It was our 
lot to be carried 
up a small river 
or creek which 
flows into the 
Potomac River 
about eight 
miles from the 
Great River." I 
think that Gen-- 
eral Butler 
thought that it said about eight miles from the 
Great Falls. As the story advances Colonel Jack 
was carried to another plantation larger than 
that where he worked before, so that the reader 
may imagine if he chooses, that he lived on Capi- 
tol Hill. Here he lived between five and six 




Major Andrew Ellicott. 



35(5 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

years. He then was established on three hun- 
dred acres of land. 

Daniel Defoe had a son who emigrated to 
North Carolina, and I am told that descendants 
of that son may be living in North Carolina now. 
But the North Carolina people do not seem to 
know or to care. Is it worth while to say in pass- 
ing that Oliver Goldsmith's trunk of clothes and 
of books went to Wilmington in North Carolina 
in the year 1722, that he never got them back 
again, and that possibly in some cellar in Wil- 
mington to-day there might be found some poems 
of Goldsmith's which would be worthy the atten- 
tion of Harper's or the Century or Mr. McClure? 

To return to the city of Washington. It seems 
probable that George Washington selected Capi- 
tol Hill for the site of the Capitol of the new 
nation. It is the same hill on which three 
witches are represented in my own ballad as 
kindling the flame on the night of February 11 
(22), 1732. But, for the benefit of the New 
York Observer, I will say that the existence of 
these witches is mythical. There is no evidence 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 



357 



that they did not exist excepting in poetry, and 
there is no evidence that they did. All that is 
necessary to say is that, if they did, they were 
there about the time when Colonel Jack was on 




View of the Potomac and the Site of Washington in 1800. 

the same ground, and that they are persons quite 
as historical as he is. 

The congressional battle over and the President 
having selected that site. Congress passed the 
necessary acts by which the District of Colum- 
bia was laid out, ten miles square, to be the home 
of the new city. Wlien people growl to-day, as 
they do in the District here, that they are not 



358 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

allowed to govern themselves by universal suffrage, 
this is to be said, ''Every one who has ever come 
here from the outside has come on that under- 
standing." Thus, the Congress of 1790 had 
its eyes open and created a federal city with 
reasons which they thought good. The Con- 
gress of the Confederation had once and again 
been insulted by mobs in the city of Philadelphia. 
Parliament in London had been lately insulted 
by London mobs. In France the Paris mob had 
again and again shown that it could change the 
map of Europe, not to say of the world. 

Whether right or wrong, the National Congress 
of 1790 meant to create a national city where the 
officers of the national government should not 
be exposed to the insults or the honors of a great 
city not under their own jurisdiction. They have 
certainly had their reward. Whatever the pub- 
lic opinion of the city of Washington is (and this 
would be very hard at any moment to tell), the 
city of Washington does not govern the United 
States as London governs England or as Paris 
governs France. And it ought to be remembered 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 359 

that it was established specially with the inten- 
tion that it should not have any such political 
power. People who are interested in such sub- 
jects would do well to observe that most of the 
American states have followed this great exam- 
ple. That is to say, they have not chosen large 





* JhL 



View of Potomac and Washington early in the Last 
Century. 

cities for their capitals, but have intentionally 
placed them in small towns, perhaps in villages, 
where the local sentiment should be most incon- 
siderable. 

The admirable adaptation of the spot must 
have presented itself to George Washington as 
soon as the plan was proposed. The very name 



360 TAERY AT HOME TRAVELS 

of Georgetown for the city calready standing there 
seems to show that somebody had ah-eady ob- 
served such fitness of things in naming this town 
from the king. I think that no other spot oc- 
curred to him, and I cannot find any reference 
to any in his correspondence or chary. 

The organic act of July 16, 1790, placed the 
work of creation of the city solely in charge of 
President Washington, and it would seem that 
till his death he never lost the direction of the 
creation of the city. It seems certain that he 
directed Major L'Enfant, who laid it out on sub- 
stantially such a plan as that which appears on the 
maps of to-day. There has been, and probably al- 
ways will be, much discussion as to their real origin. 
L'Enfant was a young subaltern in the French 
army, who arrived with D'Estaing in 1778. He 
was wounded at Savannah, returned to France, 
and was engaged in the city of New York in 
reconstructing the building occupied there by 
th(^ first Congress. He was afterwards in Phila- 
delphia in the employ of Robert Morris, the 
financier. Morris's friends asserted that to L'En- 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 361 

fant's waste and incompetence Morris's financial 
ruin was due. 

There is no doubt, however, that Major 
L'Enfant was employed by George Washington 
to draw the original plan of the ''Federal City.'' 
But as early as 
January, 1791, 
Major Andrew 
EUicott, who 
was at that time 
an officer of the 
government, was 
instructed by 
Washington to 
^' go down to 
the spot staked 

out on the paper Charles Bulfinch. 

design." A letter from Jefferson, Secretary of 
State, dated January 15, 1791, says, ''The Presi- 
dent thinks it would be better that the outline 
at least of the city, and perhaps Georgetown, 
should be laid down in a plat of the territory. 
I have only now to send it and to desire that 




362 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

Major Ellicott may 'do it as soon as convenient, 
that it may be returned in time to be laid 
before the Congress." Ellicott was at this time 
in the government service, and the instructions 
to him, dated February 2, go into great detail. 
Money is furnished to Ellicott for the expedition, 
and we have a long letter from him of February 
14, announcing the completion of the two first 
lines, with a letter to his wife. He writes again 
to her from Georgetown on the 20th of March, 
sending ''a small bundle containing a pair of 
black silk mitts and a small smelling bottle 
which I hope you will receive as a small testi- 
mony of pure affection as ever had place in the 
human breast." 

Here Ellicott worked all the summer. He speaks 
of L'Enfant as ''my companion Major L'Enfant, 
who is pronounced in English Lonfong. He is 
a most worthy French gentleman." This is 
interesting because before November of that 
year Jefferson, who was Secretary of State, wrote : 
''It has been found impracticable to employ 
Major L'Enfant in the degree of subordination 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 



363 



which was lawful and proper. So that L'Enfant 
had been notified that his services were at an end." 

In 1802 a com- 
mittee of Congress 
''find that the plan 
of the city was orig- 
inally designed by 
Mr. L'Enfant, but 
that it was in many 
resiDects rejected by 
the President of the 
United States, and 
a plan drawn up by 
Mr. Ellicott which 
recognized the ' al- 
terations made 
therein was en- 
graved and published by the order of General 
Washington in 1792." 

On the authority of this very strong statement 
in an official report, the friends of Major Ellicott 
have ijlt that full justice was not done to him 
when it was stated that the city as it now exists 




Monument KKEcitD in 18(10, at the 
Navy Yard, Washington. 



364 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

was the creation of L'Enfant. There is no doubt 
whatever that the city as it now exists follows 
lines of the surveys made when thte region was 
almost a wilderness ]:>y Ellicott, and it seems to 
me equally sure that Ellicott was following 
as well as he could the general plan of L'Enfant, 
in which, however, he was privileged by his com- 
mission and by the necessities of the case to make 
frequent changes of detail. While, therefore, 
it is strictly true that the present city follows the 
lines laid down in the engraved plan of Andrew 
Ellicott, it is equally true that those lines were 
laid down in the wish to execute the general plan 
as it had been approved or used by George Wash- 
ington and Major L'Enfant. Ma'jor Ellicott soon 
had a controversy with the commissioners as 
L'Enfant had done already. 

In an interesting biography, published since 
this paper was originally written, Latrobe, a 
young Englishman, whose subsequent achieve- 
ments like those of the rest of his family were 
those of Titans, comes in for a share of the 
credit in the original surveys of the city. 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 3G5 

The L'Enfant plan is now well known to half 
the people of America, a very wise modification 
of what people call the ^'gridiron" plan, which, 
as I suppose, William Penn invented when he 
introduced it into Pennsylvania. By that plan 
one body of parallel streets run north and south, 




Back View of the Capitol, Washington (about 1810). 

one body run east and west. The Philadelphia 
people and most Western people like this plan, 
which is undoubtedly convenient for strangers. 
Boston people and people trained under the tra- 
ditions of other centuries dislike it. The disad- 
vantage is that you have little or no power of 



366 TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

expressing your own wish when you go from one 
place to another, and that you may be in a very 
bad fix if, on a hot day in August, you are in 
Philadelphia and you liave to walk two miles to 
the northward between quarter of twelve and 
quarter past twelve. You have no alternative: 
you must go with the sun shining on your back, 
and no emperor, pope, king, burgomaster, mayor, 
or chief of the police can help you. If you die of 
sunstroke before you arrive, your body will be 
decently carried to the morgue. But they cannot 
help you, they cannot prevent the sunstroke. 
Now, in a city laid out like Boston, where the 
streets follow the slopes of the hill or the curve 
of the shore, an intelligent person may elect by 
what route he shall go from one point to another, 
and how he may exempt himself from disagree- 
able contingencies, perhaps fatal contingencies. 
L'Enfant had the wit to adapt his city to both 
the systems. For the convenience of the mathe- 
maticians he laid out the gridiron city, where 
A B C D E F G, etc., represent the streets which 
run east and west ; and one,- two, three, four, five. 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 



367 



six, seven, eight, etc., represent the streets which 
run north and south. But L'Enfant was a man 
of affairs — in a way he was a prophet — and he 
said to himself, 'Tor what is this city built?" 
Answered by his 
good angel, ''It 
is built to provide 
for the adminis- 
tration of a great 
nation." "What 
is the first requi- 
sition?" Answer, 
"That each de- 
partment of the 
administration 
may communi- 
cate easily with 
every other." 

After receiving 
these inspira- 
tions, L'Enfant located on good places, as Nature 
had designed them, the points where the Capitol 
should be, where the Navy- Yard should be, where 




Mount Vernon. The Tomb of Wash- 
ington. 



368 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



th{> Court-House should be, where the President's 
home should })v, aud where the Departments of 
State, of War, and of the Treasury should be. In 
those days the Navy Department was a part of 
the War Department. Men did not yet look for- 




The Capitol, about 1830. 

ward to the Peace Department, as we do now, nor 
had the Patent Office nor the Post Office nor the 
Agricultural Department developed themselves. 
But, lest they should develop themselves, L'Enfant 
reserved squares or circles for them. Then on 
his plan he supposed that the President might 
wish to send his veto or his approval with the 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 369 

utmost speed to the Capitol, and so he drew in 
Pennsylvania Avenue from the President's house 
to the Capitol. He supposed that haste might 
be required from the Capitol to the Navy- Yard, 
and so he drew in an avenue there. In like man- 
ner he supposed that from each of his circles and 
squares to another people might wish to go directly, 
and he drew in avenues in other places. So is it 
that you have a double plan of "avenues " extend- 
ing northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest, 
like the legs of a tarantula or other spider, mak- 
ing one plan ; while the gridiron system, which is 
a system of so-called streets, makes another. This 
is the plan of to-day. Whoever writes the sequel 
to this paper in the year 1951 can explain what 
now exists in plaster in one of the rooms of the 
Library of Congress, the additions which hope- 
ful people expect to make as this half-century 
goes on. 

There seems to be no doubt that Washington 
and his commissioners, and L'Enfant as well, 
supposed that the principal residents of the city, 
with the single exception of the President, would 

2b 



370 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



fix their homes on the high plateau north and east 
of the Capitol. It is exactly suited for what 
the modern world calls the ''residential" quarter 
of the city. Washington himself built his own 
house near the Capitol, just to the north of it, 
on this plateau. Pennsylvania Avenue, from 




The President's House, 1832. 

the infant Capitol to the infant White House, al- 
though running through what was very nearly 
a swamjj, furnished cheaper lots. Naturally, 
as most business was done at the Capitol and at 
the ^^'llit(^ House, the most of what our native 
language calls ''travel" went over that highway; 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 



371 



and tradition says that this is the reason why the 
city extended itself in that direction and did not 
take possession of what was meant to be the 
'^residential" region. If you say this to a man 
from the Middle states or the West, he hardly 





^^^^^IHJ^^S 


^nj 


^^^^^^h£k|^k%i 


jsiiiff 


W^B 


SHj 


EJ^^B^IS'^ 


agg^iy^^^Hg 




Bt 



Department of State. Eakly in the Last Century. 

listens to you, he is so eager to say to you that all 
cities always grow to the west in America. This 
is rather a curious superstition which exists in 
this nation, built perhaps upon Berkeley's famous 
line, ''Westward the star of empire takes its way." 
These things are what Western men say to you, 
as Herodotus says. 



372 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



You will perhaps let me say in passing that my 
first acquaintance with that unknown land east 
of the Capitol, where the city of elegance was to 
have been, was formed when I was taken there 
in October, 1844, to attend the funeral of Adam 




House of Kkpresentatives, IS.!!. 

Lindsey. This seemed so much like stepping into 
one of Scott's novels to bear my part there that 
I cannot help telling the story. In the days of the 
old French Revolution, when Robert Burns 
mixed himself up in French politics, and other 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 373 

young Scotchmen with him, the Tory govern- 
ment of England pounced upon a lot of those 
young fellows and frightened them badly — I 
guess with reason. Among them was my Adam 
Lindsey, who fled to America, and here he thought 
he would be a market gardener in the new city, 
and he bought his land in those ''residential" 
quarters. He was some four generations from 
the Adam Lindsey who befriended Mary Queen 
of Scots at Lochleven, and, so to speak, I shook 
hands with the old Adam Lindsey of many gen- 
erations before. They told me, and believed, that 
the succession had been for all these generations 
in the same name. 

In the last twenty years there has been no 
danger in sympathizing with Robert Burns's 
revolutionary views and hopes. But in his day 
Pitt's government was very severe on any ex- 
pression of such opinions as his, whether in Scot- 
land or in England. They followed up with bitter 
animosity Muir who had made a reputation 
among the extreme Radicals of England and 
Scotland, and they sent him to their new colony 



374 



TARKY AT HOME TRAVELS 



of Botany Bay. Another mart^T of less degree 
was Fyshe Palmer, the Unitarian minister of 
Dundee. He also was sent to Botany Bay for 
seven years. At the end of seven years he was 
liberated, but before he returned to Scotland 




View of Washington from the Capitol, 1832. 

he was shipwrecked on what is now our island 
of Guam, and there he died and was buried. But 
an American captain named Balch who was well 
up in democracy brought his body back to Boston 
to give it Christian burial. And here he was 
buried again in a public service conducted by 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 375 

Buckminster. And if any antiquarian can tell 
me where his grave is, I will tell the people of 
Dundee who want to know, — not that they want 
to move the poor bones again, but by some proper 
tablet they would like to show that Fyshe 
Palmer's martyrdom is not wholly forgotten. 

Robert Burns himself wrote one of his best odes 
in the days of the American Revolution. But 
at that time nobody dared print such treason. 
So it was only in 1872 that it was printed from 
the original manuscript. I have never seen it in 
any American Edition. 

Every one feels the difficulty of remembering 
the mathematical and alphabetical names of 
streets. In 1844 a few of us devised a system of 
names for the streets, which have been waiting for 
sixty years for confirmation by the various gov- 
ernments of the city. A, B, C, D streets were 
to be Adams Street, Benton Street, Calhoun 
Street, Derne Street, and so we went on, till, at 
the end of the alphabet, you had Zebulon Street, 
in honor of Zebulon Montgomery. First Street, 
Second Street, Third Street, etc., were to be 



376 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



\\'()nder Street, Tudor Street (in honor of the Vir- 
ghi Queen), Trinity Street (for Trinity Church), 
Ivy Street (IV Street), Vermont Street, Vh'ginia 
Street, Pleiades Street; Eighth Street was 
Atlantic Street, and then we had Muses Street, 
Tennessee Street, and so on. Poor Mr. McFar- 




The Presidkxt's HorsK, from thk Potomac, 1839. 

land, who, with his commissioners, rules the city 
so magnificently, will have to consider these 
names after sixty years, and, as \w is a])t to ])ut 
things through, the calendai' of such names will 
be well adjusted. 

Washington is now a very agreeable city. It 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 377 

is a very beautiful city. People who have noth- 
ing to do with the government of the nation like 
to come here to live. And no wonder. But for 
the tens and twenties and thirties of the last 
century, it is spoken of with great disrespect by 
the people who had to live there. To this day, 
when you go into the East Room at the White 
House with a guide who remembers the traditions, 
he tells you that Mrs. John Adams dried her clothes 
on washing day in the East Room. And the 
notices by travellers and the scraps which have 
escaped from old files of letters speak with great 
contempt of the infant city.* The phrase ''mud- 
hole" seems to have stuck, and certainly as late 
as the Civil War, before the wonder-works of 
''Boss" Shepard, it deserved that name. I re- 
member seeing an artillery-wagon stuck in the 
mud in front of the Treasury Building, waiting 
for a relay of additional horses to be brought 
up to haul it out of its dilemma. A lady told 
me the other day that as a little girl she rode to 
Lincoln's second inauguration. The carriage 
stuck so deep in the mud that her father had to 



378 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

leave the carriage and assist in disinterring it. 

The building of the city began after L'Enfant's 
plans and the work of the first generation which 
followed. As I am in the line of parentheses, I 
may say that L'Enfant, who as has been seen seems 
to have been a rather eccentric person, got into 
stiff quarrels with everybody else concerned, and 
retired to a plantation in the neighborhood, 
where his grave is still to be seen. The property 
was subsequently purchased by Mr. Riggs. Let us 
hope that before this Congress dissolves a proper 
memorial may be erected there to L'Enfant's 
memory. As for monument, he has a right to 
the inscription, ''If you want a monument, look 
around." 

I made my first visit to Washington sixty-one 
years ago, as I have said. I spent the months 
of October and November there, in a little brick 
house occupied by my dear friend George Jacob 
Abbot, the same who was afterwards Under- 
Secretary of State and United States Consul at 
Sheffield. George kept a school there, and he 
and I lived there together for two months, while 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 



379 



the ladies of his family were at the North. In 
the rear of the house there was a little stable, and 
in that stable we kept our cow. The house 
stood where Mr. Pollock afterwards built a palace 
which is there to-day, at the corner of I and 




Washington from the White House, about 1840. 

Seventeenth streets. It was opposite General 
Macomb's house. For our one servant we had 
a dear old saint named Josephine Cupid, whose 
color may be guessed at from her name. The busi- 
ness of the housekeeping began when Josephine 
milked our cow in the morning, and then opened 



380 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the stable door and drove her out to pasture. 
She came uj) by what would now be Connecticut 
Avenue to an open common, ten times as large 
as Boston Common is to-day, and thei'e the cow 
spent her day with two or three hundred of her 
race and sex, eating such grass and drinking such 
water as a grateful nation and a good God pro- 
vided. I doubt if the quantity of the food weighed 
heavily upon her stomach or her conscience. 
At all events, before night the memories of the 
stable came back to her, and half an hour before 
sunset she would be heard at the door. This 
means that in 1844 land was not of value suffi- 
cient north and west of that corner to be inclosed. 
Who owned it I do not know. Uncle Sam owned 
some circles and squares there. But the anec- 
dote occurs to me because I have been writing 
the beginning of these memories in a closely 
built part of the town, quite in the heart of Jose- 
phine's cow's rampaging ground, which is to 
say, I suppose, about a mile from our stable. 
The city has grown, in those sixty years, from a 
mud-hole which had thirty thousand people, 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 



381 



perhaps, within its borders, to a city of two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand inhabitants. 

The only part of this common which was fenced 
in must have been near where the British Embassy 
is now. We called it the gymnasium, I think. 
That was the high- 
souncHng name for a 
bowling-alley which 
the young men kept 
up. I remember one 
afternoon we per- 
suaded Mrs. Madison, 
who was still alive, to 
visit us there, and 
with great effort she 
got a ball down the 
middle of the alley and was complimented on her 
knocking down the king. President Tyler came 
over and played with the young gentlemen some- 
times. Everything had the simplicity and ease, 
if you please, of a small Virginia town. Wlien- 
ever the weather would serve, a great many of 
the Southern members of the House or the Senate 




Mrs. Madison. 



382 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

rode to the Capitol on their saddle-horses. There 
were thirty or forty posts in front of the Capitol 
near where the statue of Washington now stands. 
You rode up to one of those posts and hitched 
your horse. You left him while you went in and 
attended the meeting of the House; you came 



The Smithsonian Institute. 
From an old eugraviug. 

out and unhitched him and rode him to your 
two o'clock dinner. 

I do not think that in the somewhat mechanical 
etiquette of Washington to-day we have improved 
on the familiar ease of social life in those days. 
If you were a youngster of five-and-twenty or 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 383 

thereabouts, you took your constitutional in an 
afternoon on foot or on horseback. Where shall 
we take tea? Let's go to Mrs. Seaton's; it's 
always pleasant there. So you rang the bell, 
which was immediately answered by a well- 
pleased negro; and you went into that large, 
cheery drawing-room to find perhaps five and 
twenty other gentlemen who had looked in at the 
same time. Somebody brought you a cup of tea, 
somebody brought you a biscuit. You stayed 
five minutes or an hour and a half, as you liked, 
and within ten days you looked in on Mrs. Seaton 
again. 

I asked a friend in New England once what 
parallel we had to this in our New England cities, 
and he cried out, raising both hands, '^Oh, if that 
happened once, your Mrs. Seaton would move out 
of town next day." Nor do I find anything quite 
like this in Washington in the arrangements of 
to-day, with Monday for Judges, Tuesday for 
the House, Wednesday for the Cabinet, Thursday 
for the Senate, and so on. One is a little apt to 
send his double to leave the cards in such a system. 



384 



TARRY AT HO^SIE TRAVELS 



For all that, one of the men most competent 
to speak in this world tells me that in no capital 
city of the world is ''society so well organized" 
as it is here. Certainly I know no city where you 
can see so many agreeable people if you want to 
and if you have the time to do it. Washington 
people themselves say and think that in a year's 
time everybody in the world who is worth seeing 




The Capitol, about 18.50. 

looks in here. It is probable that this is a little 
as Abraham Lincoln said of a book, that people 
will read such and such a book who like to read 
that sort of book. The Washington people rate 
the social order of the world by considering first 
those people who have liked to come to Washing- 
ton in the previous twelve months. Prince Henry, 
for instance, takes a higher grade in their book 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 385 

of notables than Prince Alfonso or Prince Karl. 
And it is true that agreeable travellers like to come 
here. It is true that the Ethnological Bureau has 
in its employ nine hundred accomplished men of 
science who have to be here once a year. It is 
true that the National Academy and the Colonial 
Dames and the King's Daughters and every other 
grand order in the country is apt to meet here, 
so that, whatever else you lack, you will not lack 
the society of agreeable people. About forty 
thousand New Englanders, as I count it, pass 
through Washington every winter southward 
because it is too cold in New England; while 
about twenty thousand other people of the same 
blood and lineage are going northward because it 
is too hot in Florida and Georgia. These people 
meet each other at Washington. The result is 
a little like that of putting cold water over an 
alcohol lamp when you want to make coffee. 
This winter has been especially cold here (the 
winter of 1905). They never had to shovel their 
sidewalks, I think. They certainly do not know 
how to do it, and in the middle of the winter the 

2c 



386 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



commissioner bade them put sawdust and ashes 
on the ice of their sidewalks, to the great surprise 
of a considerable part of the population. 

To continue for a moment the comparison of 
the Washington of 1844 and that of 1904, I may 



t«x\iH;*i%^^,\ 



■^^,_:L,f:--:,/^&l^,^ 




House of Representatives, about 1850. 

say this, that in square miles or square inches 
the nation of that day was not half as large as is 
the nation of to-day, and I may say that half the 
nation then was pretending and trying to feel 
a certain indifference toward national legislation, 
and I may say that everything then depended 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 387 

upon mails and nothing on the telegraph; and 
that the mail of that day took, on an average, five 
times as much time for its service as the mail does 
now. I remember seeing a man who had been 
riding day and night from New Orleans — ''looked 
as if he had just come out of a state's prison," 
as somebody said. It was in Philadelphia, and 
he had been eight days and eight nights doing it. 
So it happened that whoever came to Washing- 
ton then felt in fact somewhat as a man feels who 
now happens in at Quebec or at Glasgow. Pie 
came out of America into Washington. Just 
now the truth is exactly the other way : you come 
into America when you come into Washington. 
Take my own dear townsmen. To this hour 
the very best of them doubt the real existence of 
any important communities in the world farther 
off than Springfield on the west, or Portland on 
the north, or Newport on the south. And those 
very people come here by stress of weather — 
a Raymond excursion party, for instance — 
somewhat as if they were going to the City of 
Mexico. They find here better houses than they 



388 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



left at home ; they find the Congressional Library, 
they find people who have just happened over 
from Seattle or Santa Barbara ; so really, for the 
first time, they get some idea of what their coun- 
try is. 

Tnd(HHl, one could not contrive a better little 




Navy Yarp, Washington. 



pattern of America than he gets when he goes 
through the street in which he passes a palace such 
as has no superior in the world and comes next 
to the clay bank left by ''Boss" Shepard, next 
to whicli there is a slab shanty perched up on the 
to}) of a bank waiting foi" some Western Senator 







389 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 391 

to wish to build a palace there. I mean that the 
city is finished to the highest point of modern 
civilization in one place, and that it is left where 
L'Enfant and Washington left it in another. 
That makes an admirable type of the United 
States of to-day. 

The winter of 1844-45 was the winter in which 
Texas was annexed to the United States. Amer- 
ica cares nothing for history, and the generation 
of to-day does not even know by what ingenuity 
that annexation was effected. The Southern 
oligarchy of that time meant to have Texas as 
a part of the United States, let it cost what it 
might. Here was this fine region, as large as 
France, which had declared independence, and 
the Southern people wanted it because its position 
would turn the balance of slavery or freedom 
in the United States. For the same reason, the 
Northern people did not want it. It was then and 
there, for instance, that the state of New Hamp- 
shire, now one of the most strenuous of Repub- 
lican states, turned right over from being the 
most strenuous of Democratic states. Under 



392 TARRY AT HUME TRAVELS 

the leadership of such men as John Parker Hale, 
they refused to play the Southern game any 
longer. 

A treaty had been arranged l)etween the re- 
public of Texas and the United States by which 
Texas should be admitted into our nation. As 
late as April, 1844, the Senate rejected this treaty 
by the vote of 35 to 16, while the treaty required 
two-thirds of the vote in its favor. So the magic 
of the ''Joint Resolution" was tried. When you 
cannot do a thing by statute or ti'eaty, you do it 
by a ''Joint Resolution"; and the short session 
of 1844-45 was spent in driving through the two 
houses a "Joint Resolution" providing for the 
annexation of Texas. 

This gave magnificent speaking in both houses. 
It witnessed the bolting of those Northern Demo- 
crats who then and there left the Southern alli- 
ance forever. And whoever lived in Washington 
thought it was the most ini])ortant year in history. 

I find a cc^-tain interest, therefore, in seeing that 
it now occupies fourteen lines in Bryant and Gay's 
Ilistoiy of five volumes. We Northern peoj^le 




303 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 395 

had supposed that the Senate could be rehed 
upon to defeat the Joint Resolution, though we 
knew the vote would be very narrow. But Presi- 
dent Tyler was doing his best, and Mr. Polk's 
followers were doing their best to whip in recu- 
sants. 

I left Washington, I believe, on the 3d of 
March, 1845. I know I was so angry at Polk's 
election that I would not stay to his inauguration. 
This was foolish in me. I called Mr. Rufus 
Choate, who was one of our Massachusetts Sena- 
tors, out from the Senate Chamber and said to 
him, ''I am going to Boston, Mr. Choate; what 
shall I tell my father ? " ''Tell him we are beaten, 
Mr. Hale. Magno prcelio victi sumiis." They 
had heard that morning that a certain Maryland 
Senator, about whose decision no one had known 
till then, was going to vote for annexation. When 
it proved a few days after that his son was 
appointed judge by President Tyler, people 
supposed they knew why that vote was given. 

The constant pressure, one may say, of those 
great debates in the House and in the Senate 



396 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



interested tlie little city of thirty thousand people 
almost to a man or a woman in the proceedings at 
the Capitol. But as one sees Washington to-day, 
Washington cares very little what is going on at 
the Capitol. People are quite too dependent 



"tr-ES'SssR^;. 




:Wf^ 



Washington from Arlington Heights, 1872. 

on th(>ir newspapers to distress themselves. 
Exactly as there are many people in Albany 
this winter who have not been to the state Capi- 
tol of New York, as there have been as many 
people in Boston, Hartford, and Providence who 
have not been to the State Houses of Massachu- 
setts, Connecticut, or Rhode Island, so you would 



WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW 397 

find that in the city of Washington in the last 
winter two-thirds of the men and women had not 
been into the Senate Chamber of the nation or 
into the House of Representatives. But that 
was not so when the question in the Capitol was 
supposed to be the question whether the United 
States is a nation or the United States are a 
confederacy. 



CHAPTER X 
THE NEW WASHINGTON 

Yes, I suppose in a fashion all capitals are 
alike. But the people in Washington are a little 
apt to suppose that their capital is more like 
London or Berlin or Paris than it is. Napoleon 
used to say that there were men in cellars in 
Paris who had never heard of his name, who had 
never heard of Louis XVFs name, and who 
knew practically almost nothing of the years 
between Louis XVI and what Carlyle called the 
''whiff of grape-shot." I suppose something 
like this is true now. This could not be true 
in AVashington. Yet in Washington there are 
thousands of people who are hard at work and 
do the Lord's business who are very indifferent 
to the names of the figureheads or the steersmen 
of the day. I have asked Cambridge undergradu- 
ates to tell me with whom they were reading their 

398 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 



399 



Latin or their political history, and they have 
not known the name of their teacher. I do not 
think I could ask any official, of the twenty-five 
thousand in Washington who was the President 
of the United States and find him ignorant. But 
I do think there 
is many an official 
in Washington 
whom I might 
ask to-day who 
would be Mr. 
Fairbanks 's suc- 
cessor if the 
President and 
Vice-President 
died, and the 
man would not 
be able to tell me. 




Joseph G. Cannon. 



In every department, and this is fortunate for 
the country, there are some men quite too useful 
to be turned out on a change of administration. 
A^Tioever else goes, Mr. A. B. must remain, or 
Mr. X. Y., to keep the machine running. They 



400 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

told mv in Paris when I was first tlicre that when 
Louis Phihppe became king, in 1830, there were 
clerks in the public offices who had served there 
since Louis XVI was on the throne. That was 
more than forty years. Directoire, First Consul- 
ate, Empire, Bourbon, it was idl one to them; 
the king's work or the republic's work went on 
with even step, ccquo pede. 

Any change in such order, as you can see, is 
bad. I remember I once had a letter from Wash- 
ington to ask me if I could tell them where Kohl's 
maps were — a collection of considerable value 
which Mr. J. G. Kohl had made for them. I said 
I would show them the first time I was in Wash- 
ington, and then I took one of the gentlemen 
of the Department which wanted to know — 
took him in a cab to a house which the Depart- 
ment had occupied in the war, and went up into 
a })articular hallway where was the original 
chest in which Kohl's maps were to be found. 
There have to be certain permanent people who 
remember such traditions of the Department. 

Sometimes such peo])le dro]) intcj the habits 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 



401 



of all chancelleries and adopt that mfamous rule 
of feudal governments that it is better not to do 
a thing than to do it. 

I love to tell the stories on the other side which 
show that with us the Sovereign is the People, 
that the Sovereign is in the saddle, and that the 
Sovereign pokes about in Washington as Haroun- 




CONNECTICUT AvENUE, WASHINGTON. 

al-Rashid did in Bagdad. The late Commodore 
Green told me that, coming home from the West 
Indies when he was a youngster, he said in the 
office of the chief of his bureau that he thought 

2d 



402 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

it was time that the longitudes should l)e read- 
justed by electric telegraph. If you will think 
of it, this gives you absolute precision, far greater 
than stellar- observations can give. The chief 
of the bureau spoke of this to the Secretary of 
the Navy. The Secretary of the Navy sent the 
next morning for the young lieutenant, and at 
once asked him how he would take the longitudes, 
and, seeing that he had a head on his shoulders, 
gave him a small vessel for voyages in the Gulf 
of Mexico and all the men he wanted. 

From this beginning began the system of tele- 
graphic longitudes which has gone so far that 
now every hydrographic bureau in the world uses 
the longitudes which Uncle Sam has calculated 
from our own observations in every ocean. Green 
was at work in his little tent on an island far away, 
where they had a wire to London, when some 
English officers came in, introduced themselves, 
and were interested in seeing the processes. 
Green said: ''Why don't you get some of this to 
do? The whole world is to be done, and you 
would like the work." To which one of them 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 



403 



replied: ''Get some of it to do ! How should we 
get it?" "Why," said Green, "you would go to 
the Admiralty, t(;ll them about it, and ask them 
to commission you." At which the Englishman 
replied, "Dear Mr. Green, if we spent half as 




Upper Coxnecticut Avexue, and Corner of "Oak Lawn.' 

much time in the Admiralty as you have spent in 
talking to us, we should be kicked downstairs." 
There is the difference between working in a 
country where the People is the fountain of honor 
and the Sovereign of the nation and another 



404 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

country where you have got to tell Quogga to 
tell Mingo to ask Sambo to ask Caesar to send up 
your card to Mr. Smith to ask him to consult 
Mr. Jones as to whether Sir Stopford Buffles will 
appoint a day when he can receive you. 

Two friends of mine, botanists, were coming 
up a few months ago from a botanical expedition 
in the South. They missed their connection in 
Washington, so that they had five or six hours to 
stay there. Without any introduction, they went 
at once to the Agricultural Department. There 
they were cordially welcomed by people who did 
not know their names, I suppose. They told of 
their interest in forests, they told just what they 
wanted to see and to know, and before they were 
five minutes older one of them was sitting by one 
cabinet in one room and another by the right 
cabinet in another room; and they had every 
facility for studying in the best collections of 
the world precisely the things which interested 
them and which they wanted to know. 

Compare this with an experience of mine in 
London in 1859. 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 405 

I arrived in London early in October. Mr. 
Bancroft, the historian, had asked me to make 
some copies for him in the State Paper Office. 
I wanted to do the right thing, so I called at 
once on the American minister, Mr. Dallas. Mr. 
Dallas will not mind it now if I say that he thought 
of himself quite as highly as he ought to think. 
He had a great respect for the letters of intro- 
duction which I Ijrought him, and the whole 
interview was a fine illustration of etiquette, diplo- 
macy, and red tape in which, dear reader, I assure 
you I could and can do as well as another if there 
is occasion. So I told him what Mr. Bancroft 
wanted and I. He said that if I would write 
him a note which he could send to the Foreign 
Secretary, the Foreign Secretary would send that 
note to the Home Secretary, and the Home Sec- 
retary would confer with the Keeper of the Records, 
and that he, Mr. Dallas, had no doubt that the 
Keeper of the Records would give me the per- 
mission I wanted. Here I, barbarian that I was, 
thanked him, but said if I might sit a moment at 
his desk I would write the memorandum; that 



406 



TARPvY AT HOME TKAVELS 



I wanted to see the portfolio of American papers, 
very limited, as I need not say, of 158-1. Mr. 
Dallas's hair turned gray as I spoke of sitting 
at his desk. He said he thought I had better 
give more thought to the letter and had better 




I* 




r 


^ 




g 





Dkpartmext of Agriccltcre. 



go to my lodgings and write him a note which, as 
before, he could send to, etc., etc., etc. I accepted 
the snub, went to my ''lodgings," wrote the note, 
and have never seen Mr. Dallas from that day to 
this, '\^^aat happened was this — that that even- 



THE XEW WASHIS'GTOX 407 

ing I met at a little party ^Ir. Gardiner, the diligent 
and celebrated historian of that time, that the 
next morning he introduced me to Sir Francis 
Palgrave, the Keeper of the Records, that he gave 
me a hne which opened the whole histon' of 
England for a thousand years to me. I made mj' 
copies and sent them to Mr. Bancroft, I suppose 
the next day, and then went off for ninety days 
on the Continent and elsewhere. On my return 
home in the first week of the next January, as I 
shook hands with the captain of the Europa in 
Queenstown Harbor, he said to me that I should 
find a note from the Foreign Office in my state- 
room. I wondered what the Foreign Office had 
to do with me, and I ran downstairs to find a per- 
mit from the Record Office, countersigned by the 
Home Office, count ei"signed again by the Foreign 
Office, permitting me to exannne the letters of 
the year 15S-1. 

Xow I do not say but there is more or less of 
this fuss and fe^ithei-s in Washington, but I do 
say that when the People is Sovereign and the 
Sovereign is in the saddle, there is much less of 



408 TAKRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

it than there is where they are trying to maintain 
the forms of the Middle Ages and to use the 
machinery of Egbert or Alfred or William the 
Conqueror. This sometimes ends in putting 
Wamba the son of Witless, son of an alderman 
the son of a fool, into the cab of a modern loco- 
motive to take an express train across the country. 

There is an old saw, concocted a generation ago, 
which said that when a Boston man is introduced 
to a newcomer he asks, ''What does he know?" 
That in New York the Knickerbocker asks, 
''How much is he worth?" In Philadelphia the 
people ask, "Who was his grandfather?" In 
which joke there is an element of truth. The 
Washington people now say that they ask, "AMiat 
can he do?" I think that to a ver}^ perceptible 
extent this epigram is true. 

The interesting thing about social life here is 
that you meet so many different sorts of people. 
You would not be surprised nuich if one of them 
had three arms, or if another had wings, or if 
another had some sort of ears or eyes which repre- 
sented a seventh or an eighth sense. By this 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 



409 



I mean that the habits of one man have been so 
imhke those of another that you are somewhat 
surprised that you find yourself talking English 
with them all. They do not know it themselves, 




State, Wak, and iS'avy Building. 

but they really live a good deal each man in his 
own world. 

I said above that in the old days everybody 
in Washington kept the run of the proceedings 
in Congress, but now those people keep the run 
of the proceedings in Congress whose business 
it is to know what the proceedings in Congress 



410 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

are. But you shake hands with a press reporter 
and go up into the office of the "How To Do It 
Bureau," to find a gentleman who has not thought 
of Congress for a week. He probably knows 
that Mr. Cannon is the Speaker of the House, 
he is quite sure that he has heard of Mr. Gorman 
and Mr. Lodge in the Senate. But he dismisses 
them because they are doing their business; 
he is doing his. Well, it is a little as I once had 
in the same week a letter from James Haverstock 
in Burnside's army to ask me if I could tell him 
where his brother John was; and I had another 
note from John Haverstock to ask me if I could 
tell him where James Haverstock was. I wrote 
to each of them that his brother was in the same 
brigade in North Carolina that he was in himself, 
and that if he would get a pass from the colonel 
he could go over and see him. James and John 
were both in their duty; they were serving God, 
as the Prayer-Book puts it, in the condition of 
life where he had appointed them. 

And it is a little in the same way that the 
gentleman in the ''How To Do It Bureau" knows 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 



411 



that the leaders of the Senate and the House 
understand their business better than he does, 
and does not bother his head about them at all. 
On the other hand, Mr. Lodge and Mr. Cannon 
have had things of certain importance to do. 




Patent Office. 



They have gained that certain experience of life 
and so they really think that the man in the 
''How To Do It Bureau", knows more than they 
do about the handling of yellow fever and the 
irrigation of Arizona. And this is to say that they 



412 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

have arisen to that subhme height in which a man 
obeys the instructions which are given to the 
Thessalonians. 

As I have intimated, there is another element 
in the Washington of to-day in which the city 
differs entirely from what I call irreverently the 
Virginia ''mud-hole" of 1844. By exactly the 
same law which sends the geese and ducks from 
beyond the equator to Bird Rock in the Gulf 
of the St. Lawrence and then sends them back 
again, a flock quite as large of New Englanders 
and New Yorkers pass south every winter to 
Florida and Georgia and perhaps Mexico and then 
pass north again as the spring opens; earlier or 
later, as the counsels of men or women happen 
to prevail in the separate families of the migrators. 
Well, exactly as the geese and ducks and rice- 
birds have to stop sometimes to rest themselves 
in their flight, nine-tenths of the pe()i)le from the 
North have to stop at Washington to give two 
or three days to inquiries as to the government 
of the country and how it is administered. They 
do not stop at Chester or Perryville or Baltimore, 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 413 

though the train stops at those places. But at 
Washington they stop and spend what Miss 
Ferrier calls the rest day, the dress day, and the 
press* day. Then they go on. Those same birds 
do not stop when they come back, l^ut the tenth 
part which did not stop when they went on stop 
when they return. 

This constant renewal of life, all belonging, as 
you observe, to the immediate family of the Sov- 
ereign of the nation, gives a curious element, or 
bright spots of gold, if you please, to each day, 
such as I have never observed in any other place 
in which I have lived. It is a very interesting 
element. It does Washington a great deal of 
good and it does this American people a great 
deal of good. In proportion as they make a 
longer or shorter stay, for the rest of their lives 
they believe the newspapers less or more when they 
read about Washington, and are better or worse 
informed as to the real government of the nation. 

To meet such featherless birds of passage, if you 
are of the temperament of the people who like 
that sort of thing, you will look in at the Arling- 



414 



TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 



ton or the New Willard or the Driscoll or the 
Normandie or all of them every day and shake 
hands with Mrs. Vanderlip, to whom you gave 
her degree at Chautauqua in 1893, or with Mr. 
Champernoon, whose father was at school with 




White Housk. 



you at the Latin School in 1833. They will tell 
you the last news from New Padua or Fort Fair- 
field, and you will tell them whether the Cabinet 
changes mean a quarrel or have been foreordained 
from centuries. If, while you are talking with one 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 415 

or two of them in the great common hall which 
is now a part of every hotel, there turns up a very 
bright and intelligent-looking fellow whom they 
do not know but whom you do know, and the con- 
versation suddenly changes to Nansen's book or 
to the temperature of Wilkes's Land in the Ant- 
arctic, that is because this gentleman is a press 
correspondent. I like these gentlemen, and they 
have been promoted step by step in journalism 
till they occupy the most important post in the 
metropolitan journals. At the same time, I 
cannot but observe that their presence in any 
circle is apt to throw a restraint upon the con- 
versation there. If it happens sometimes, oc- 
casionally let us grant, but still sometimes, that 
the metropolitan journal or the metropolitan 
correspondent does not voice the latest whisper 
of the Washington circles, it is because of a cer- 
tain reticence which is natural enough when they 
are present. 

Now, let us contrast all this with the old Wash- 
ington. I was walking down town one morning 
in 1844 and I met Joseph Grinnell, who was a 



416 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

member of Congress from New Bedford. I joined 1 
liini, and he told me the morning's news. Samuel 
Hoar had arrived from Charleston with his daugh- 




I'oST Ofkhk 



tcr, having l)een turned out of that city l)y a mob 
of gentlemen, who waited upon him and told him 
that if he did not leave Charleston with his daugli- 
ter a mob of blackguards would compel him to 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 417 

do so. Samuel Hoar would have been as willing 
to die from a Charleston pistol as an}^ man, but 
he rightly measured the position, and with his 
daughter took the steamboat for Wilmington, 
and came up to Washington. This was seventeen 
years before Sumter, but Grinnell knew that it 
was the beginning of the Civil War. Before the 
morning had passed I had written to the Daily 
Advertiser in Boston the news of this crisis, and in 
two or three days the letter arrived in Boston. 
It was printed in the next morning's Advertiser, and 
in a day more it was in New York. It was copied 
in the New York journals, and was the first news 
which those journals printed of a transaction 
which we now know was critical in the affairs of 
men. I do not think there was a professional 
newspaper correspondent in Washington in the 
year 1844. I do know of our correspondents 
in the Boston Advertiser office, that the letters 
were from Mr. Winthrop and Mr. Grinnell and 
Mr. Choate, all members of Congress who had no 
idea that the Advertiser would need other infor- 
mation than they could give it. In earlier years 

2e 



418 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

the letters which will be found there by careful 
historians are from Edward Everett, Rufus Choate, 
Robert Winthrop, Daniel Webster, Joseph Story, 
and one or other New England Representatives. 
The earliest letter from my brother is of the date 
of 1843. The gentlemen of the press will excuse 
me and will agree with me when I say that the 
physical necessity which now compels so many 
square inches of news a day, whether there be any 
news or not, has not improved the quality of the 
daily letters which, naturally enough, the local 
press of every city has to print every morning 
or evening. 

There was no better sign of the times in those 
early days than one could see in any issue of the 
Charleston dailies. Observe that not one of them 
printed more than five hundred copies. How 
they lived Heaven knows. But thev did have an 
impudent habit of omitting national news, as if 
it were only by accident that they had any con- 
cern with it. Exactly as the Tribune has no sepa- 
rate heading every day of the action of the Swiss 
government, so the Charleston Courier did not 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 419 

recognize what was going on at Washington, 
except as it would an incident of general infor- 
mation. If it were proposed to inspect steam- 
boats on Southern rivers, they would copy the 
information as they would have copied a motion 
in the British Parliament on the importing of 
cotton. 

This single illustration suggests that it may 
be well to put in words the central distinction 
between the Washington of 1844 and that of 
1905. The motto of the Madisonian, I think 
the paper was named, which pretended to be the 
special organ of the general government in those 
early days, was in the words attributed to Jeffer- 
son, ''The best government is that which governs 
least." I cannot fix the quotation, and the fact 
that the Madisonian said it was from Jefferson 
is no evidence that it was so. But when you 
remember that in John Adams's time, when the 
3^ellow fever was in Philadelphia, Adams went 
to Braintree and the other members of his little 
Cabinet to their respective homes, and one might 
say there was no general government practically 



420 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

for many months till the Philadelphia fright was 
over, you understand what happened before the 
People were really wonted to the idea of a nation. 
You get traces of the same thing when you find 
that Jefferson never alludes to cotton-gins or 
steamboats, and that as far down as Jackson's 
time there were plenty of men to say that Con- 
gress could not appropriate money for a national 
road to the West. 

Now you remember, by contrast, quite enough 
instances of coy indifference to national duties 
in your visits at different departments to-day. 
Here is the Department of Agriculture ; it sends 
its agents over the world. A man in Guatemala 
finds ants which will destroy the cotton weevil 
in Texas, a man in northern China collects and 
brings home peach-stones of a variety invaluable 
to America. But if you had proposed a Depart- 
ment of Agriculture in John Tyler's time, you 
would have been told that the Constitution gave 
no power for any such thing. Or you go to Dr. 
Harris at the Bureau of Education ; ho is in cor- 
respondence with all the states and all the tor- 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 421 

ritories right and left; he is sending or receiving 
information for the whole nation. As a little 
side amusement and play the Department of 
Education has changed the whole interior life 
of Alaska by introducing reindeer from Siberia. 
Now, to have proposed a Board of Education in 
1840 would have been madness. 

The Civil War changed all that. As I am fond 
of saying, the United States is a nation, while our 
Southern masters were then saying all the time 
the United States are a confederacy. They pre- 
tended, when the President made an official pro- 
nouncement, that he held just the same relation 
to the United States as the Queen of Holland now 
holds to the forty states which have consented 
to the Hague conventions. But nobody says 
this now. Sam Adams and Patrick Henry from 
their seats in any other world look with amaze- 
ment though with satisfaction on a capital of 
a nation which extends from sea to sea. It is 
a nation which understands home rule as nobody 
else understands it. Yet at the same time it is 
a nation which is not afraid to pick up a pin or to 



422 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

launch a navy if the needs of the nation require. 
At this moment the Department of Agriculture 
is engaged in the irrigation of a million square 
miles, be the same more or less. If you ask 
them, as the British commander asked Ethan 
Allen, by what authority they are acting, the 
Department of Agriculture would say, as he said, 
that they are at work ''in the name of God and 
the Continental Congress." They would not talk 
about state sovereignty or state supremacy. 
They would say, I hope, that a good many milhon 
people in the world are asking God for their daily 
bread, and it is the business, as He orders, of the 
Department of Agriculture, to enlarge the world's 
produce of daily bread. ''Time works with us," 
they will say, "and in a few years we will give 
you farm's which produce a hundred bushels 
to an acre where the cactus or the mesquite now 
struggle for their lives." 

Yes, the agonies of the four years between 
the 15th of April, 1861, and the 3d of April, 
1865, can never be fully told ; but this is certain, 
that the God of history has already given us the 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 423 

compensation for such agonies, as in the forty 
years which have passed since He has made it 
certain to the eighty milHon people between the 
Atlantic and the Pacific that the United States 
is a nation. 

In the second year of the Civil War, a distin- 
guished English traveller said to me that it was 
all very well to keep on fighting, ''but, of course, 
you know, there cannot be, you know, a nation 
extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There 
never has been such a nation and there never will 
be. You will have to arrange for four different 
nations to cover that territory." To whom I 
replied, with rage hardly concealed, ''There never 
has been such a nation, but it is the will of God 
that there shall be, and you will see that that is 
what we are fighting for." 

Now, precisely as Jerusalem was a city guided 
by the priesthood, even if the technical rule was 
in the hands of soldiers, as Lowell is a city of 
weavers and spinners, as New York is a city of 
tradesmen buying and selling, as Princeton is a 
city of students and teachers, so is Washington 



424 TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS 

a city of men and women who are fed by the nation, 
who work for the nation, who hve for the nation, 
and as the nation chooses. Granting that half 
of them have ties and memories which bind them, 
say, to Georgia or Minnesota or the state of Maine, 
or to other states; granting that some of them 
even go to vote in those states as a sort of gahant 
symbol of their birth and education, all this is 
but a trifle, because their life is a national life. 
Twenty-five thousand people is a large number 
when you remember that the population of the 
white, which is the ruling race in the city, all told, 
is not more than one hundred and thirty thousand. 
When we were schoolboys, we used to say with 
James Otis, ''One-fifth are fighting men." I sup- 
pose we could say of Washington now that one- 
fifth of its white residents are in the direct service 
of Uncle Sam — of the government of the United 
States. Now, for the loyal love which these peo- 
ple bear to the Union, to the nation of which they 
are, by whom they were nursed, there was really 
nothing to compare in the Washington of 1844, 
if you left out perhaps the members of the 



THE NEW WASHINGTON 425 

Cabinet. This man was a Virginian, that man was 
a Carolinian, and, sandwiched in with them, 
one in a dozen, was some Northern man with 
Southern principles, but who would have called 
himself a New Yorker or a ^lichigan man, while 
his own successors in office to-day would say 
gladly and proudly that they are Americans. 



INDEX 



Abbot, George J., 378. 
Agassiz, IjOUi's, 15. 
Agricultural Department, 406, 

420. 
Allen, Ethan, 102, 237. 
Alpha Delta Thi, 323. 
Amherst College, 157. 
Andrew, John Albion, 14. 
Armstrong, Samuel C, 4.5. 
Ashburton, Lord, 9, 16, 42. 

B 

Bar Harbor, 44. 
Barnstable, 180. 
Beeoher, Lyman, 245. 
Bennington, 126. 
Berkeley, 214. 
Bethlehem, N.H.. 68. 
Block, Adrian, 199. 
Blue Laws, 230. 
Boston, frigate, 330. 
Bowdoin College, 31, 47. 
Bowdoin, James, 45. 
Bristol, Rhode Island, 210. 
Brown, John Carter, 227. 
Bulfinch, Charles, 361. 
Burgoyne, John, Gen., 120. 
Burlington, 105. 
Butler, Gen. B. F., 353. 



Calthrop, Rev., 337. 
Cayugas, 335. 

Champlain, Samuel de, 112. 
Channing, William F., 32. 
Charter Oak, 116, 231. 
Chase, Pliny E., 7, 32. 



Chastellux, Marquis de, 202. 
Columbia River, 187. 
Connecticut River, 69. 
Connecticut, the State, 228. 
Corson, Professor, 337. 
Crosby, W. O., 38. 
Cuttyhunk, 140. 

D 

Dartmouth College, 74. 
Dartmouth, Lord, 74. 
Dawes, H. S., senator, 190. 
Defoe, 353. 

Divisor and Dividend, 2. 
Dixville Notch, 69. 
Dummer Fort, 98. 
Dwight, Dr., 7. 

E 

Ellicott, Andrew, 355, 361. 
Ellsworth, Oliver, 233. 
Erie Canal, 3. 
Erie Railway, 334. 
Everett, John, Capt., 90. 



Five Nations, 335. 
Fox, George, 216. 
Francis, Colonel, 122. 
Eraser, Simon, Gen., 118. 
Frye, Wm. P., senator, 53. 

G 

Gas-pee, destruction of, 203. 
General Sullivan, canal-boat, 
149. 



427 



428 



INDEX 



Gerrymander, 172. 

Glen Family, 319. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 356. 

Gosnold, 139. 

Gray, Prof. Asa, 196. 

Greene, Nathaniel, Gen., 213, 

226. 
Greenleaf Family, 54. 
Greenough, Richard, 219. 

H 

Hale, Nathan, Capt., 245. 
Hale, Nathan, Col., 123. 
Hale, Nathan, of Mass., 22. 
Hales of Newbury, Rhode 

Island, Connecticut, New 

Hampshire, 26. 
Hartford, 239. 
Harvard College, 173. 
Haj'es, Francis B., 56. 
Hoar, Sam'l, 416. 
Hopkins, Esek, 211, 214. 
"Hub of the Universe," 12, 

145. 
Hudson, Hendrik, 13. 
Huidekoper, Jan, 336. 
Hull, Judith, 204. 
Hutchinson, Anne, 71. 
Hyde, Dr. W. D., 46. 



Idealists, a state of, 223. 
Iroquois Indians, 8. 



Jack, Colonel, 353. 

Jackson, Dr. Charles Thomas, 

2<S. 
Judith Point, 203. 

K 

Katahdin, Mt., 20, 37. 
Kemble, Fanny, 331. 
Knox, Thomas, 54, 
Kropotkin, 110. 



Laurentian Rocks, 15. 
L'Enfant, Peter C, 361. 
Libiaries in New York, 345. 
Lindsey, Adam, 379. 
Little Falls, 325. 
Longfellow, H. W., 29, 59, 

177. 
Longfellow, Samuel, 29, 56. 
Longfellow, Judge Stephen, 31, 

56. 

M 

MacDonough, Com., 128. 
Macomb, Alex., Gen., 127. 
Madison, Mrs. James, 381. 
Madisonian, newspaper, 419. 
Maine, 20, 25. 
Maine Law, 62. 
Marsh, Geo. Perkins, 131. 
Massachusetts, 139. 
Miranda, 142. 
Mohawk Indians, 335. 
Mohawk Valley, 304. 
Moore, Thomas, 330. 
Morgan Horse, 136. 
Morison, Nath. IL, 32. 
Mount Vernon, 367. 
Mount Washington, 65. 

N 

Navy yard, Washington, 388. 
New England, 11, 19. 
Newport, 201, 214. 
Niagara, 329. 
Nott, Eliphalet, 312. 



Oneidns, 335. 
Onondagas, 335. 



Packard, Prof. Alpheus S., 52. 
Patent Office, 411. 



INDEX 



429 



Peequawket or Pigwachet, 71. 

Petaquaniscot, 206. 

Portsmouth, 71. 

Post Office, Washington, 416. 

Presbytery, 71. 

Proctor marble ciuarries, 135. 

Q 

Quincy, Josiah, 349. 
Qiiincy Railway, 147. 
Quincy Town, 152. 

R 

Red Jacket, 315. 
Revere, Paul, 161. 
Rhode Island, 199. 
Rhododendron, 199. 
Robinson Crusoe, 354. 
Robinson, John, 179. 
Rochambeau, Marshal, 201, 

239. 
Rochester, city of, 337. 

S 

St. Clair, Gen. Arthur, 121. 
St. Lawrence River, 325. 
Saunders, Alexander, 321. 
Saunders, Anne, 319. 
Sawyer, Harry, 69. 
Seneoas, 338. 
Sewall, Samuel, 205. 
Smibert, John, 220. 
Southampton, Earl of, 140. 
Sparks, Jared, 41, 226. 
Spooner, 69. 

Spragvie, Charles, quoted, 327. 
Stark, John, Gen., 91, 119. 
State Department, Washing- 
ton, 371, 409. 



Stiles, Rev. Ezra, 346. 
Stuart, Gilbert, 220. 
Sugar Loaf Hill, 209. 
Sumner, Charles, 193. 
Syracuse, 322. 



"Tempest," Shakespeare's, 141. 
Texas, Annexation of, 391. 
Thoreau, H. D., 191. 
Trumbull, Jonathan, 235. 
Tuscaroras, 335. 
Tyler, John, 395. 

U 

United States, The, 421. 
University of New York, 343. 



Veazie Railroad, 148. 
Vermont, 21, 98. 

W 

Washburn, E. B., 57. 
Washington, City of, 370, 414. 
Washington, George, 304, 349. 
Wayland, Francis, 225. 
Wayside Inn, 184. 
Webster, Daniel, 12, 16, 42, 

156. 
Wellington, Duke of, 130. 
Wheelock, Eleazar, 73. 
White, Andrew D., 337. 
Wilkinson, Jemima, 336. 
Williams, Roger, 208. 
Winslow, Edward, 131. 
Worcester, 182, 183. 
Wright, Carroll, President, 186. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



'BIRTHDAY EDITION 



The Man Without a Country 



Illustrated with a Portrait of the Author 



Cloth 8vo $3.00 net 



Printed with large, bold type on handsome, heavy paper, it is the 
finest edition that has ever yet been published of the remarkable 
American classic, which is not surpassed, nor even yet in any 
degree approached, in setting forth as a prominent trait the 
desirable virtue of American patriotism. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



Memories of a Hundred Years 

Profusely Illustrated 

Cloth 8vo $2.50 net 

"Dr. Hale's work is more than a mere patchwork of recollections and docu- 
ments. It is a story which moves. It is a history built up from person- 
alities and broadened in conclusions and estimates. It is biography of 
the best kind, for it constantly sets over against an intimate view of the 
subject the theories of those who are remote. The phases through which 
the country has developed — in politics, industry, sociology, culture — 
are revealed in shifting scenes, while one event after another, or one 
person after another, is brought directly into the focus of personal 
contact." — The Outlook. 

"The marvellous thing about his memoirs is the range of interests which they 
cover. ... If any man alive to-day is fitted to be the historian in his 
own proper person of the last hundred years in America, it is certainly 
he." — The Review of Reviews. 

"The personality of the writer saturates its every page, a personality which, 
having the defects of its qualities, is as interesting as it is unique." 

— The New York Evening Post. 

"Edward Everett Hale has told the story of progress of the American people 
during the nineteenth century, first from the oral and written records of 
his family, and then from the personal experiences of his long life of 
fourscore years, aided by letters and other manuscripts in his possession. 
Life and individuality are thus given to the history of the epoch, with 
views of men and things so original as to be beyond the powers of the 
mere compiler. Therein lies the great charm and the value of the work." 

— San Francisco Chronicle. 

"The hundred years is no misnomer; and we feel that we are always listening 
to a man who, almost from his first youth, was in touch with the currents 
of national life and in deep sympathy with the deeper pulses of the 
national spirit." — The Churchman. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



'r>«<, 



'<^^. 



KS^*^' 



.^••WMlitf. 



^PR\959 



i 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



012 608 317 8 # 



Hi'' 

n\ 
w 



i! 



I 



u 



i 
i 1 »{ 









IP 






1111; 



a 



